Pls HELP: Razr MAXX email syncing issues

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Apparently my brother’s Razr MAXX (through Verizon) had a major Android OS update pushed out to it yesterday or something, and as a result he had to re-set up his email accounts (a managed-by-Gmail account and a vanilla one). Anyway, he sets it up and suddenly it starts downloading messages from 3 years back!? WTF?

I told him there has to be a setting on there that makes the phone start with the most recent emails first (I can’t believe it’s not the default). He and I looked through all the settings we could find and there just isn’t any such setting. What’s up with that? On iOS devices the default is something like the 50 most recent email headers. The best we could do was to set up his POP on his account to only push out messages arriving “from now on” but that’s hardly satisfactory.

What are we missing?

2

What app is he using for email? The Gmail app, for instance, does default to “Last 4 days’ worth of emails from select labels.”

3

Hmm, I guess he’s just using whatever came on the phone by default (maybe Verizon-provided?).

4

it could be he was accessing email as imap before.

now he’s accessing it as pop and it’s wiped all the email off the server in the process.

5

I’ve also got a Verizon ICS phone, so it’s possible I’d have the app, too. If you find out what it is/what kind of account it is (Exchange, hotmail, etc.–I wasn’t clear what your categories meant in the first post, possibly because I just woke from a nap and feel dumb), I’ll poke around :)