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If I understand the situation correctly, there are two mail readers, man and wife (call them M and W), two mail accounts (M's account and W's account, and by "account" I understand a place where email is received), and then each reader has several devices, and wants to be able to read mail on any of them, with read/unread status being synced across the reader's devices, but each reader also wants to have access to all the mail received in the other reader's account, and the two readers' read/unread status for each message should be independent, and also one reader should be able to delete a message and this message should stay available (undeleted) for the other reader. So e.g. M can read a message and then it would be marked as having been read across all of' M's devices, and would be marked as unread across all of W's devices. and then W can access the message using any of her devices, and then it would be marked "read" on all of her devices. And then W can decide to delete the said message, so it would be deleted from all of her devices, and would be left available on all of M's devices, with the same "read" status on all of M's devices (and if W was quicker and deleted the message before M had read it, it would still be available and marked "unread" on all of M's devices). In addition an archive is needed (call it A), were all the messages would remain available offline forever.
So the way I think this can be done, is that each reader and the archive (that is a sort of a third reader that is a an email hoarder) have a separate account. M's account will forward all incoming email to W and to A. W's account will forward all incoming email to M and to A. A would receive only mail forwarded from M and from W.
A would download all incoming email and keep it forever (doesn't matter if it's POP or IMAP, unless one wants to automatically classify some mail into folders on the server, then one would use IMAP to fetch the content of all the folders. Also if A wants to have two offline copies of the mail archive, on desktop and on laptop, then probably IMAP should be used to keep both locations synchronized). M and W would each use IMAP with their accounts, and that would sync the mail status across all their devices, independently of each other, and if one of them deleted a message it would be unaffected in the other's account (and in A's account) since they are separate copies in different accounts. Basically that's all, but since each receives copies of all of the other's email, probably filtering rules can be used on server to separate the other's email to a separate folder.
That still doesn't take spam filtering into account. Probably each of M and W should do their spam filtering on the server, on all copies received (that includes the other's spam). A can just keep all email, including spam, or else separate spam and either keep it forever in a separate spam folder or discard it, depending on how important it is not to lose false positives in the archive.
Anyway, I think the key to having two (or more) readers access the same reading material without affecting each other is to give each reader a separate copy.
Probably this can be done with less than three IMAP accounts, by using filtering rules to make copies of messages in several folders, but this might go wrong, depending on how copying messages is implemented on the server (I found out the hard way that that making a copy of a message in a separate folder in Fastmail doesn't really create a separate folder: deleting an attachment from one copy removes it from the other copy).
I have a simpler way to keep all my email the same across all my devices: I only use webmail...
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