Someone Still Uses POP?

Posted on August 25, 2003

Over on his blog, Mitch Kapor has posted an interesting dissertation on why he prefers POP over IMAP for retrieving e-mail.

Interestingly, my impressions are almost 180 degrees from his. He likes POP because it transfers all mail to the local PC, and you work with the local copies. That’s exactly why I prefer IMAP — because I don’t want all my mail dumped to my PC, I want it on the server so I can get to it from my work computer, my home computer, a laptop, or anywhere else there’s an IMAP client available. With POP, once the mail is transferred it’s essentially unavailable to me from any other machine. (If I used a laptop as my primary PC — in other words, if I had a single PC that traveled with me, rather than traveling between a series of desktop computers — I might feel differently. But I don’t, so I don’t.)

To each his own, I suppose…