"The Great Debate" - POP vs IMAP (fork of Mail Problems)

[Scot Hacker]

On Oct 5, 2006, at 9:38 AM, David Zhou wrote:

> IMO, POP is only simpler if you consistently use a single machine  
> to check your email.
>
> I juggle between work and home machines, and syncing up email would  
> be a pain if not for IMAP.

Seems like IMAP is a double-edged sword. Ideal for keeping work and  
home and webmail  all in sync. But most providers don't give you  
unlimited server  space to store your mail. So if you want a complete  
and permanent archive of all kept mail both at work and home, IMAP  
doesn't get you there* unless you  manually drag mail off the server  
into local archive folders. That's fine for geeks, but what I've  
learned from dealing with customers is that most people (yes, most)  
are totally confused by the idea that some mailboxes are on their  
hard drive, some on the server, how and when to drag stuff off, etc.  
POP solves this problem easily if you have it not delete mail from  
the server at work and delete it after say two weeks at home. Then  
users have complete local archives in both locations without ever  
having to think about the tricky differences. So these days I  
recommend POP to most users and IMAP just to  advanced users.

* Even Gmail maxes out at 2GB of online storage, while I've got users  
with 10 year old Entourage mailboxes over 4GBs - IMAP just isn't  
built for that.

./s

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