Re: POP3 is horrible
Note that I personally don't give downvotes, but still note your ratios here. There's a reason for that.
"Sure, you are reliant on your email provider with IMAP..."
And THAT'S the huge issue. If you change providers (change ISP, for example), you lose your emails, don't you? With IMAP, unless you make a local repository and manually copy all your emails to those folders, you lose your emails, correct? If you downloaded with POP3 it is already done, or if you wish to sync with a POP3 client it is a single operation rather than manually selecting and copying possibly thousands of emails.
"Using POP3 is just asking for your emails to be spectacularly wiped in a catastrophic event fueled by fear and regret, if you care about your email archive you should avoid it like the plague.
I've seen people lose all of their data, and companies go out of business because of POP3."
Data is data is data. If they lost their emails then they lost data in general - which means their backup plans / systems SUCK. If they lost their quarterly reports do you blame their lack of backup solutions or their HDD which finally failed after 6 years of continuous operation?? Everyone who is anyone in tech knows that backups are *your* responsibility. POP3 data is just another thing that is necessary to back up; if you didn't make a local IMAP repository copy, and the email server at your ISP dies and takes down all your saved emails with it, will you be just as happy as blaming IMAP for not saving those copies??
I use IMAP across almost all my devices, except one. That's the POP3 client. It gets synced via POP3 occasionally and then I have permanent, local copies. It also serves the purpose (because I have it set that way) to purge all that old email flotsam that's accumulated, I don't need rapid access to 2 year-old emails, thank you very much, but I also don't want to risk them disappearing into the internet ether, either.