Too much mail - Yikes! Email ****!

Question

I just got my iPhone a couple of weeks ago. Set up two mail accounts, one my .mac account, one a personal account on my web host.
I'm getting batches of 50 emails at a time, as expected. I laboriously delete the junk (is there a filer system I can use to do this? Or batch delete to save me time?).
After I've deleted all the stuff I don't want to read on the phone, it's pulling old messages - like days and days worth - stuff I've laready deleated.
Is there some way to stop old mail from coming back? Is there some way to filter or white list mail for my iPhone?
I want to read my massive amount of mail at home, but want to be able to check mail and filter down and read important mail while I'm oput an about, but currrently, I'm so overwhelmed with stuff that I have no intention of reading on the iPhone that it's pretty useless without filtering.
Any suggestions?
THX
MJ

Answer 1

Rhyd,
Actually using IMAP with .Mac you can turn on junk mail filtering on the .Mac server via webmail interface. It doesn't apply to POP3. Go to http://webmail.mac.com, and then the settings link on that page once you have logged in.
For other IMAP accounts any other IMAP client that filters spam mail out of Inbox will help when its running, and many can be configured to delete spam, or move suspected spam to local folder so that other email clients accessing the same account don't see them.
In general IMAP is a more robust protocol especially when accessing the email account from more than one computer or device.
I suspect in this case part of the issue is using both POP3 and IMAP from seperate connections to the server. However, I was attempting to clarify that before troubleshooting it further.
Hope this helps,
Nathan C.