Saving Email So I Can Reliably View It - this is my iPhone's Last Chance

Question

Has anyone found any way - application or otherwise - to be able to save emails or attachments on your actual iPhone? Seems kind of useless to have all that memory on the phone and not be able to save documents or emails on the phone itself.
I had trouble viewing several of my emails on Thursday night (I got the "this message has not been downloaded from the server" despite the fact that I had viewed it just moments before) and called Apple Support. This particular individual, though very nice, stated he had not yet heard of this problem, which I found hard to believe given how much discussion there has been about it on these forums. Several hours later (I'm not kidding - it was hours), the problem was not resolved. Best we could figure, the most likely culprits were:
1) Emails with attachments, so I opened a Gmail account, thinking I could use that for emails with attachments. Alas, I could not view pictures or attachments through Gmail.
2) Emails that had been downloaded and then deleted from my server. So now I have to leave any emails I want to view on my server into perpetuity?? And hey, guess what? This doesn't solve the problem either - I had an email that is still on my server, big as day, but when trying to view it on my iPhone, I get the "not downloaded from server" message.
To make matters worse, Saturday I tried to send an email and had absolutely no luck. When it didn't send, it just disappeared! Hey, Apple - no outbox?? I can't make new files under my email, I can't sort it, I can't save it to a separate file on memory...what's the point? It's the worst email program I've had on any phone I've owned.
Phooey. My Palm Centro refurb, which I bought for $50, downloads my email and keeps it *on the phone*. I can view the Internet, maybe not the same quality as the iPhone, but I don't care if it's pretty, I just want the information. I can open AND SAVE Word, Excel, and many other documents with a free application that I downloaded from Palm. I can play music on it - maybe not as much as on my iPhone, but enough to get me by until I get to my iPod (which I do like). I can make ringtones out of any song I want, not just the ones that iTunes says I can.
And my Centro weighs about 1/3rd as much.
With all of these arguments, unless I can find an application or some other solution that allows me to save my emails and my attachments to the phone's memory, and that doesn't cost $50, this phone is going back. It appears to be a matter of form over function.

Answer 1

No, they don't disappear. I am new to iPhone (2 weeks) and I'm here trying to figure out the whole Mail issue, so I might not be able to help much, but it seems to me that the iPhone will keep the most recent 25- 200 messages, which you decide in Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendar. Other settings seem partly dependent on your mail program. I use Gmail, and was getting the message that mail hadn't been downloaded from my server, which wasn't helpful. But I read on here that setting up an IMAP Gmail account manually will solve that problem, and it did. Right now, I am trying to figure out how to get mail to download into BOTH my iPhone (where I want it only temporarily) and my Apple Mail account - it seems so far it is randomly both or one or the other!
And - using Gmail, you can keep desired messages/attachments on the iPhone by putting them into the Starred box - then they are not subject to the most recent 25-200 rule.