Help email issue

I don't know what a Charter email account is but that appears to be the core of the problem - it only allows one connection to be active from what you wrote, a restriction I last saw in the days of dial-up connections when people only had one PC in use at any one time.

The Nexus (like most other portable devices) is being helpful by checking for email in the background, which your mail server seems to regard as a permanent connection - and it only allows one of them for some arcane reason. Best fix is to use a proper email provider that allows multiple connections as is needed in the modern world

That's even more odd, because IMAP is intended to handle multiple connections to the same account...

Sorry, without knowing more about your mail service (of which I know absolutely nothing) I can make no meaningful suggestion on how to make it work properly; I've used various Android devices with IMAP using the inbuilt email client and they all worked fine.

You might try one of the many email apps from the Play store, they tend to be more comprehensive than the one that comes with the system. I no longer use anything but Gmail - which can automatically pick up my other ISP email stuff for me - but when I used IMAP I found Maildroid and K9 Mail quite good. Got to be worth a try

Try deleting your email account on the 7 and re-read carefully the instructions about your charters method. Or just call Charter!

Btw, when adding your charter account did it do in automatically, or did you have to do it manually?

Gmail can collect mail from any other providers using POP3.

To set it up it's probably best to use a computer with a "proper" browser: go to your Gmail account in a browser and click on the settings icon ("gear wheel") top right and select "settings".

Click the "Accounts" tab and scroll down to "Check email from other accounts". Click on "Add a POP3 mail account you own" and take it from there; you basically set it up much as you would set up any email client and tell it how often you want it to check for email, any email it finds will appear in your Gmail inbox.

Optionally you can also set it up to use the identity of the checked email account rather than Gmail if you reply to one from within Gmail; this is a very convenient feature which for me makes it unnecessary to ever use a normal email client, even on a PC. There is a plethora of settings that take account of every possible combination of POP settings offered by different email providers, but most of the time you'll probably want the default settings which seem sensible.

Not everyone likes the idea of Google "seeing" all email but I don't mind. The huge advantage for me is having all mail in one place for all time on all devices, but if you want to be able to also access it direct on its original server make sure you set up Gmail to leave email on the server. I have it set to delete from server since I use only Gmail to access mail whatever device I happen to be using.

PS: Gmail uses "labels" in exactly the same way IMAP uses folders, so you can easily add a filter to Gmail to label mail forwarded from other accounts so that it can be instantly identified. Indeed if you access a Gmail account using IMAP (yes, you can do that too!) the labels appear as folders in the IMAP view. You can't (yet) tell Gmail to collect mail from another IMAP account, it can only use POP.

It's a complicated subject - I hope my ramblings haven't confused it even more... ;-)

Edit: after posting I found Google's help page for this subject. I expect it does a better job of explaining it than I did

Ah, that last comment was revealing. I'm now assuming you were using POP3 on your PC and IMAP elsewhere - which is the cause of the problem if the POP3 server was a bit pedantic about single connections (which is what POP is all about). Use either POP3 on all connections - one at a time of course - or use IMAP; never mix and match, it will end in tears as you found.

The Gmail solution works well for me; Google's servers are well-behaved and can be accessed from anything, anywhere - once set up it all "just works"

I agree on the Gmail suggestions. I collect three other email accounts in Gmail and emails are all identified as to which account they came from. I can send from any of the accounts right from Gmail and never have to go to the other accounts, as I have Gmail delete emails from the other servers.