I appreciate all you smart people trying to help me. I said I don't use Exchange OR imap. I use pop. You now have an encyclopedic list of everything I know about email.
alostpacket asked if I don't use exchange, what do I use. I use pop email from 1and1.com, a hosting site that hosts the .com I use for email. I also have a gmail account.
As far as I can tell, this is how my email works:
An email hits either address, gmail or .com, and is forwarded to my Droid. Outlook also checks these same 2 areas every few minutes. The Droid has no way of knowing that I even use Outlook, therefore any deletion on my Droid has no effect on my Outlook, and vice versa.