Hi Guys
So I went today with my friend to get her an iPhone (she's kind of technically unsavvy).. all is well except for email.

It took awhile and we finally got her @sympatico.ca email to download.. but it started downloading emails from 2007 - 1000+ emails.. we don't want this.

The rogers guy told us to switch to gmail (which she should have done awhile ago) and then forward the @sympatico.ca emails to the gmail account.

We did that. I Then archived 90% of the emails so they weren't in the inbox. There is only about 50 remaining in the inbox.

Now we went through and re-added her new account for gmail to her iPhone (no sympatico left on there.. gmail is the only account) and now it's downloading the emails from 2007 again!

how do we stop this from happening and only download the most recent emails??

It should only download 50 or so emails. Also, make sure in Gmail settings you ENABLE IMAP.
This is VERY important. Delete the Gmail account from the phone, go into Gmail settings from your web inbox, turn on IMAP, then add the account back to the phone. It should only download about 50 messages from your inbox and they will get marked as "read" if you read it on your phone OR from the web.

Sounds like your friend hasn't had access to a computer in a very long time.
I think another solution to their problem would be to sign into their sympatico mail account on a computer by logging in from a site like sympatico.msn.ca. They can access their email account and have all of their mail delivered to their proper email box. This will bring their email up to date. Also it's better to create a Yahoo mail account for the IPhone. It's a free mail address and you can also forward your .sympatico email to the Yahoo mail.
Only Yahoo mail (ymail) will give you Push email. It's doesn't work very well right now but it's the only free option. Gmail does not Push.

Almost forgot. Another option to access their proper email account is through windows messenger if the email has a windows passport assigned to it already. This can be done by signing in the windows/msn messenger and then clicking on the get email from there.
Your public library has free computer access.

I'll try enabling imapp

all those emails were read.. I don't know why they were showing up as unread..

so imapp was already enabled.
any other suggestions?

just one thing to keep in mind with the iphone... i've made the mistake before of toggling settings like turning push on and off just to try different things and then found that i had to make the settings the way i wanted and then do a power down/power up on the phone to make everything functional...

If she isn't tech savvy then remind her and perhaps yourself that if she forwards her emails from sympatico to gmail and the gmail account is connected to the iPhone then when she receives an email from the sympatico account she might try and respond to it via the gmail account. It all becomes very complicated. Just a reminder.

Then check their sympatico settings and make sure they don't have "mark email as unread" checked.
You could also call sympatico and tell them about the problem that you are having, RE: receiving emails a second time on a different device.
It could be a sympatico email problem.

We're trying to migrate her into gmail now.. no more sympatico.. so when she replies.. we want it to be from her @gmail account.

but what I'm not getting: I basically selected almost ALL of the forwarded emails (from sympatico) and archived them. therefore, they're not in the inbox. why are these emails showing up as NEW emails on the iPhone? When clearly they are not.

I'm going to try and set it up using the "other" button and not gmail.. that might work. If not I will just have to delete the much older emails and just keep the most recent ones.. maybe that will work.