Should I move from POP3 to IMAP? SMTPecial Snowflake stuff below.

October 23, 2020 1:50 PM

I'm an old internet person, and have stuck with POP3 email (i read via PC and one phone) mostly because I don't really love the idea of deletions syncing between devices. There may be emails that are relevant to me on my computer but not on my phone. Currently i can delete them from my phone view with no consequence. With IMAP if i were to delete it/archive it, it would be lost on

I feel like maybe I'm making a bunch of assumptions about how IMAP works and I might be the only one on the planet still using POP3, but there are things that are important to me about how I manage my email.

Are there benefits I'm not thinking of? (other than being able to use a more varied range of email-related sofware)

My concerns:
- I have a complex and rather large local mail structure set up on Thunderbird on my PC (dozens of filters for sorting emails into assorted mailing list category folders, automatically deleting notification emails, moving emails between account folders, etc) Would switching to IMAP destroy that, if the files are not on the server anymore? Would it result in a bunch of duplicate emails if the server doesn't 'know' they are the same? It seems like nigrating my folder structure from current local folders based on POP3 account may be messy.

- Maintaining one stream of cloud-hosted email may be annoying especially with all my thunderbird filters that would only be run when PC is internet-connected, and folders that may not be the best view (i just want a single thread of all my email when on mobile). I see there's a thing called Sieve which seems to be server-side filtering/sorting but not any more than that. It seems weird to rely on one local machine to sort the emails when the whole point is to keep everything automated on the servers.

What am I missing? Am I overthinking?

posted by softlord to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

"It seems weird to rely on one local machine to sort the emails when the whole point is to keep everything automated on the servers." That's right, plain IMAP is a little weird, which is why many email providers have added their own server-based filtering. Typically people don't want to deal with the same email twice, I think. The prefer t sort it on PC, and it's sorted on the phone. Delete it on the phone and it's deleted on the PC. Same goes for replies, etc. You wouldn't have to do it that way. The big downside is that you have to have space for all your email on the server, with a second downside that your PC has to be on and connected if you want it to apply rules/filters.

POP only really made perfect sense in the dialup/old-school days when servers had little storage and connections were slow. Most people choose IMAP for the benefits above. That said, you could try keeping your phone on POP, and migrate the computer to IMAP. Make sure that the IMAP (and POP) are set to leave messages on server. You could just try it for a bit and see if moving the messages to subfolders in IMAP causes them to never appear on the phone's POP account. You would still, I think, be able to delete on the phone with impunity. Worst case you could forward all the incoming messages to a different account and read/delete them there. Once you like how it's going, you drag and drop the local folders onto the IMAP server and come back in a week. Actually, I didn't have the greatest luck with that part, though the IMAP server was GMail, which is its own whole thing because it doesn't have folders, so I ended up buying migrator that took care of handling timeouts, etc.
posted by wnissen at 2:10 PM on October 23, 2020

Best answer: I’ve been using IMAP for a long time now but I remember being a little wary when I first switched, being a creature of habit and liking things to be done a certain way. I now can’t imagine why I’d ever want to go back to POP3.

I think that you would essentially create a new IMAP email account with your provider and check that for email, instead of your POP account. Your existing POP email would remain in Thunderbird and you’d now have a new set of folders there for your IMAP account, and these would be mirrored on the server.

You could, if you wanted, copy or move your POP email to the IMAP folders, and then it would be on the server too. I noticed this info about switching from POP3 to IMAP with Thunderbird that might help.

How to filter your email on the server may depend on your provider. I use Sieve, which I configure manually using a web-based form for editing the text file it uses. This seems a little insane in 2020, but it works. There is at least one extension for Thunderbird for managing Sieve filters (I haven’t used it).

One note: in Thunderbird, somewhere in the options for your IMAP account, there’s a setting to ensure it downloads and keeps copies of your email. I imagine you’ll want to make sure that’s checked.

You may have to tweak your workflow, re deleting emails from your phone that you will need on your PC. Obviously, with IMAP, if you delete an email on your phone, that email will also be deleted when you get to your PC. Instead you could add a folder in which you put email to deal with on your PC. Move emails to that when you’re on your phone, check in it when you’re on your PC. Something like that?

It’s great to have access to all of your email, with everything organised in the same ways from every device. I miss Eudora and my email of the 1990s as much as the next person, but IMAP makes life much simpler for me.
posted by fabius at 2:13 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Like fabius, I was slow to switch to IMAP and would not go back to POP3 at this point. I prefer to use server-side filtering (thanks, Fastmail) and leave everything on the server rather than downloading everything. The advantage here is that don't have to worry about having a backup of all my local mail folders, they're on the server. When I set up a new PC all I have to do is set up Thunderbird and point it at Fastmail, everything's just as I left it.

This would also be the case for you, except you'd need to preserve your Thunderbird filters for future mail - but everything already filtered would be preserved in the IMAP folder structure on the server.

(And you could use IMAP to read your mail on your phone as well, plenty of phone MUAs support IMAP.)
posted by jzb at 2:18 PM on October 23, 2020

Server-side filters/sorting is absolutely a thing. I have "rules" set up for both my Gmail and Exchange (work) account that probably do all the things you have implemented in Thunderbird.

From a ten second internet search, it looks like server side filtering isn't part of the IMAP protocol and it's something that has to be implemented separately by your mail provider. Gmail is its own system that exposes IMAP as an interface; it's not just an IMAP server.

Also in the age of near-infinite storage space (esp. with tiny text emails), deleting emails isn't really a "thing" anymore. I have all my email starting from 2005 that can be searched.
posted by meowzilla at 2:19 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

One consideration is privacy/security. Whether POP or IMAP makes more sense depends on your threat model.

If you think someone might try to bypass you (such as by going to your host or ISP) to get at your email, POP3 is safer. If you think they're more likely to attack your personal devices or home network, you might prefer IMAP, especially if you have quick-wipe on your phone.

Personally, I'm on the POP side of that equation. The privacy of email in the US is poorly protected by law (ask General Petraeus). I never read personal email on my phone or tablet except through webmail, don't need fancy IMAP stuff, and am perfectly happy with filtering email via Thunderbird.

(get offa mah lawn, I guess)
posted by humbug at 2:34 PM on October 23, 2020

Obliquely: A) try getting less email, and B) reconsider your whole model.

A) It takes work to not get email, but that work pays off over time.
B) why delete emails when they take up approximately zero space even on old hardware?

I don't know how old you are but my first somewhat powerful email address/client was through FidoNet. Honestly email was better then because it was almost always something I wanted.

But now it's not, so my (IMAP) method is to get few enough that I don't have to care about any of this. YMMV, good luck!
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:00 PM on October 23, 2020

Response by poster: @saltysalticid Old enough to have had Delphi, Prodigy and Compuserve email addresses :)

Cutting down my email consumption is a separate related concern, though a lot of it is kept for archival purposes more than newsletter addiction.
posted by softlord at 6:53 PM on October 23, 2020