Comment by fluoridation
Comment by fluoridation 14 hours ago
Hey, POP3 still makes sense. Having a local copy of your emails is useful.
Comment by fluoridation 14 hours ago
Hey, POP3 still makes sense. Having a local copy of your emails is useful.
I just read it mainly in one place and through the web interface when I have to.
There will, because my client doesn't delete the messages from the server when it downloads them.
POP3 is more for reading and acting on your email in one place (taking notes, plan actions, discard and delete,…). No need to consume them on other devices as you’ve already extracted the important bits.
I use imap on my mobile device, but that’s mostly for recent emails until I get to my computer. Then it’s downloaded and deleted from the server.
POP is a simple mail transfer protocol (hehe...). It supports three things: get number of mails, download mail by number, delete mail by number. This is what you need to move mails in bulk from one point to another. POP3 mail clients are local maildir clients that use POP3 to get new mail from the server. It's like SMTP if it were based on polling.
IMAP is an interactive protocol that is closer to the interaction between Gmail frontend and backend. It does many things. The client implements a local view of a central source of truth.
No, the difference is that IMAP doesn't store anything other than headers on the client (at least, not until the user tries to read a message), while POP3 eagerly downloads messages whenever they're available. A POP3 client can be configured with various remote retention policies, or even to never delete downloaded messages.
I don't have an IMAP account available to check, but AFAIK, you should not have locally the content of any message you've never read before. The whole point of IMAP is that it doesn't download messages, but instead acts like a window into the server.
If you want it to be the only copy and not sync with anything
POP3 is line–based too, anyway. Maybe you can rsync your maildir?