Simple scenario, complicated technology: One family receiving mail from five email addresses via POP3 into one Outlook inbox on a single PC. Now we'd like to be able to replicate that single inbox across multiple devices (eg. desktop PC, laptop, netbook, smartphone).

If we continue using POP3 as the mail transfer protocol, messages will be downloaded to one device and will not be visible to the others; replies will likewise be isolated on the sending machine. If we switch to IMAP, I understand that we can have multiple devices maintaining a shared view of an inbox hosted at the server end, but what about multiple accounts?

I tried changing the account configuration in Outlook to fetch from the mail providers' IMAP service instead of POP3, which does give a shared view across multiple devices but also causes Outlook to create a separate inbox and PST for each account. This is awkward because it means there are five separate folders that need to be checked, and Outlook tools like search filters and rules don't seem to work across accounts.

To get what I want (five accounts delivered into one shared mailbox) it seems that I would need some sort of intervening server that collects mail (using POP3) from all our accounts into a single inbox while preserving the original destination addresses, and then serves it up to all our devices using IMAP.

Is this workable? Is it a good approach? Is there an easier way?