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by flopunctro 1931 days ago
IMAP is not an email provider, it's just another protocol for reading your mail. It is the successor of POP3, having several key improvements. Somewhat like HTTP2 is to HTTP.

If both your email provider and your client (aka mail reading software) support it, there really is no reason to use POP instead of IMAP.
1 comments
rexreed 1931 days ago
Yes, I'm aware of IMAP as a protocol. My point has to do with the location and trust. I need to be able to trust the server as a point of mail storage.

While I agree that POP still uses the server as a go-between, at least the mail doesn't reside on POP servers forever. Whereas with IMAP, if I have 25+ years of email I'd like to be able to view and archive and search, all of that has to sit at the server rather than at the client.

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jedberg 1931 days ago
> at least the mail doesn't reside on POP servers forever.

That's very dependent on the POP server. The protocol only tells the server that it is allowed to delete the message, not that it must.

I'm pretty sure if you use POP on gmail it just does an "archive" on the backend and the mail is still there, for example.

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t0astbread 1931 days ago
I'm not at all educated on POP/IMAP but I always thought the deletion thing with POP was just by convention and there's nothing in IMAP preventing you from doing the same there.

getmail supports deletion as an IMAP client, for example.

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