[rexreed]

I'm in control of my server (host) which is a shared-hosting account. While it is possible for them to store copies of the email, it is much more cumbersome for them to do that than if I just had my entire IMAP store residing on their server. For POP copies to work, they would have to purposefully copy and store all the email, whereas with IMAP they would just need to query the data store.

[lisper]

Ah, so you do trust them. You trust that they are too lazy to take the initiative to keep a copy, but merely untrustworthy enough that they might sneak a peek if they can do so without having to put forth even the minor effort of making backups of the spool directories.

Fair enough, but that strikes me as a very odd risk posture to take. Either your email privacy is valuable to you, in which case I would think you would want to protect it against non-lazy people as well, or it isn't, in which case what difference does it make?

But it's obviously your call.

[tjoff]

There are tons of situations where not having everything on the server is beneficial.

A hack will barely get them anything, neither a warrant or a bored employee.

Of course any of those situations could result in an active tap that stores everything. But that is orders of magnitude more effort and still doesn't get any history.

Just minimizing the attack surface.

[rexreed]

This is my sentiment exactly. Why should I store decades of email history with an untrusted third party?