Just upgraded from (I think) a 4S to a 6SE and suddenly, if I do something in email on the phone, it is mirrored on my laptop. Bad things like if I delete an email on the phone, it disappears on the computer! Anyone know how to make this stop?
I’m surprised that your old phone didn’t do that. With email, you’re looking at an account and your phone is just reporting what’s in your inbox. If you delete something from your inbox, it will be reflected no matter what email client your using to access it. You should be able to recover any email from a “Deleted Items” or “Trash” folder.
Your email account setting on the new phone may be accessing the main mailbox with slightly different settings - either you have switched to using IMAP from POP, or you have “delete from server on deletion” turned on and are using POP. You need to check these settings. This should not happen, but if your old phone was stuck on an old version of the OS and you updated, the version change of the OS might bring with it incompatible default settings.
Longer explanation.
There are two ways of regarding your email clients (ie your laptop and your phone.) Either,
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They are standalone copies of your email state, and they contact the email server to get copies of the emails, and can either delete the mail from the server when you make the copy or not, and explicitly manage the copies of the email on the server. This is how POP (Post Office Protocol) works. Whether a local delete also deletes on the server is a configuration option.
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Your email clients are caches of the email server’s state. All of the clients try to continually make themselves look identical to the central state, and will also make the central state reflect any changes you make locally. So if you delete an email on one client, it automatically contacts the server to tell it the email is deleted, the server deletes it, and next time any of your other clients talk to the server, they get told the email has been deleted, and so delete their local copy as well. This is how IMAP works.
The big advantage of IMAP is that none of your clients are in any way a distinguished device. The actual state of you email is what is kept on the server. You can lose all of your email clients (fire, theft, whatever) and simply connect a band new device to the server and all your email state is there. The downside is that your IPS or whoever you use to provide email services needs to store all your email, not just the recent stuff. And you need to work out resilience of that data - you can trust their backups - or you may want extra. The downside with POP is that you are on your own. You need to ensure that all your email is appropriately backed up, and if you lose a client machine, it is up to you to work out how to effectively restore your email state.
Personally, I use IMAP. I regard all of my client devices as disposable. Laptop, iPhone, home computers. Any could vanish at any time. Indeed I regard all data on these devices as ephemeral. You want to be in the situation where you could drop your laptop on the road, have it run over by a very large truck, and be utterly unrecoverable, and not lose anything except the time it takes to go buy a replacement. YMMV.
Apparently, I have to use IMAP on the phone? It doesn’t seem to want to let me go to POP.
iOS doesn’t seem to be happy to let you change an account type once set up. Disabling the current one and creating a new one seems to be the answer. The internal operation is very different, so it isn’t just a matter of changing the outward facing protocols.
OTOH, IMHO, I would really take the time to get used to IMAP. Once you get the idea settled in your mind, you won’t want to go back.
Would it be the thing for me to do if I do the majority of my email work on the computer? I only check email on the phone when I’m traveling and have stopped to buy gas or something and I very rarely answer it on the phone.
Just don’t delete things that matter on the phone then. If you know that the phone is always just a copy of the most up-to-date state of your email it is easy to work with. In many ways this works even better if the majority of work is done on your computer - you don’t have to worry about anything - it is just like a portable mirror of your real email.
And in an emergency, you know it will still all be working exactly as expected.
I’m much the same in the way I use the phone. I do however delete spam and generally unwanted stuff from my phone, and I like doing that as I know it will also be gone from my main computer when I get back to using it. Actually emailing from a phone is painful.
OK, you convinced me to give it a try! 
And now I know how to fix it if it turns out I’m too old to change my ways …
Thanks!
hi You shouldnt have a problem with Apples email; theyre known for their state of the art electronics! their support techs are always willing to lend you a helping hand!