[chipotle_coyote]

I have an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPhone, and I want to be able to access my email from any of them. POP3 is simply not designed to handle that situation gracefully. If a POP3 client is set to download email and delete it from the server, then the messages get "stuck" on whatever client happened to download it first; if it's set to keep copies of the emails on the server, then it pretty much becomes IMAP. Except stupider, since POP3 doesn't treat "downloaded" and "read" as separate concepts.

While I suspect I'm relatively uncommon in having four devices that I want to be in sync, wanting two or three devices -- computer, phone, and possibly work computer -- to be in sync probably isn't very uncommon at all.

[gkya]

I use POP3 for fetching mail from my remote mail server, and I don't want to keep mail on it (my current pipeline is: mpop > procmail (clamav, spamassassin) > gnus (nnsplit & nnml)). This does not bar me from using IMAP locally to sync mail among my devices (which is a problem I haven't handled yet, mostly because has not really been necessary for me up until now). But because I don't use folders and spam checkers on the remote, and never keep mail there, using IMAP to communicate with it is unnecessary.