[CamperBob2]

You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me, and worth managing locally, as this thread more than adequately demonstrates.

Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap, and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"

[dieortin]

I don’t see how IMAP would prevent you from having old emails

[CamperBob2]

If you're going to keep them all locally anyway, what's the point of IMAP?

(Admittedly my judgement was formed at a time when one user, one device was the rule. I suppose if mobile access to email is important, there's a good argument for keeping the data server-side. I solve that problem with VNC.)

[dieortin]

I’m not going to keep all of them locally, but that doesn’t mean I lose access to any of them. I can instantly access all my emails from 20 years ago.

As you mentioned I do access my email from several different devices, and each one having a different subset of my emails would be absolute hell.

I’m curious, do you log onto your computer from your smartphone in order to access your email?

[CamperBob2]

I’m curious, do you log onto your computer from your smartphone in order to access your email?

Usually. If I'm going to be gone for more than a few days, though, I'll shut down the main PC and run Outlook from my laptop, which is set up to leave the messages on the POP3 server so they'll get copied into my master .PST file when I get back.

20 years means that either you maintain your own IMAP server and do a good job of it, or someone else does. In my previous company, there was always some reason why people couldn't put their hands on older emails. Meanwhile, my current .PST file goes back to 2007.