- hardly nonsense - most folk I know clear their IMAP/webmail folders anyway at intervals - I certainly do not leave years of crud there - do you? We are only talking emails being 'retained' between backups. I certainly leave stuff on the POP server when I am away from home.
One minute you're just leaving mails on server between backups, the next you're trying to use the leave mail on server to enable access from multiple devices and do all sorts of other weird and wonderful stuff that POP is incredibly bad at (or doesn't do, but you're trying to make it anyway).
Yes, I do leave my mails on the server and just use IMAP to access them this yields many benefits :
(1) It reduces the amount of stuff I need to backup on my desktop/laptop. It also reduces exposure to security threats of keeping messages on a local device.
(2) IMAP is robust and was designed to be accessible from multiple devices
(3) You can create folders and sub-folders in IMAP to keep things organised
(4) With IMAP you can search on the server, and download headers only... this means that when I'm on the move with my iPhone I need both minimal storage space on the iPhone and minimal use of data roaming when abroad in order to maintain the same functionality I have on a desktop client.
(5) I can also flag messages on IMAP, which is very handy for finding important stuff quickly.
(6) I can use IMAP on as many devices as I want and never worry about one device having a different view of the world than the other.... the message set is consistently the same.
(7) IMAP can also break down MIME parts of a message.... this means, for example, on an iPhone, I can download headers.... then open the message, download the text body..... and if I choose to, I can go ahead and download an attachment right then, leave it till later, or not at all. You can't do that with POP3.
(8) Multiple clients simultaneously connected to a mailbox is not a problem with IMAP.
(9) IMAP does message state information, so if I read it on my iPhone, I can see I've read it on my desktop. Same with replying and marking for deletion.
(10) IMAP has multiple mailbox support and can do shared and public folders, a must in a work environment, but also has uses in a domestic setting.
With IMAP you an also choose to maintain a local offline copy of your messages too, whilst not loosing the server functionality. IMAP can then do a two-way sync when you're back online.
Have I convinced you about the benefits of IMAP yet BOAC ?
