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IMAP and email clients

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Chrysalis:
I use both POP and IMAP.

On my desktop for my main email accounts I use POP and keep email archived locally, however this can end up been heavy, my email storage is currently several gigs.

On specific accounts even on my desktop I use IMAP.  On my phone I use IMAP for everything and it is set to not delete on the server meaning I can still download a copy to my desktop.

I used to use outlook, and am still considering moving back to it due to thunderbird performance problems and no a/v scanning.

So a comparison of both email clients from my perspective is that.

Outlook supports scanning of email's via nod32.
Outlook has a solid performance.
Outlook manages RSS very well - however I do plan to move RSS feeds to my phone away from my email client.
Outlook on my system does not support GCM or CHACHA ciphers.
Outlook is problematic when using IMAP, works great on POP but finicky on IMAP.
Outlook when accessing email accounts can login to multiple at once, but is slow at downloading large emails.

Thunderbird supports latest ciphers.
Thunderbird has no issues on IMAP
Thunderbird I have found no way to scan email's for viruses.
Thunderbird downloads large emails way faster than outlook but also can only check one email account at a time, so its check's take much longer.
Thunderbird has odd performance issues, especially when its left running for a while, it seems to have the same issues as firefox had with its lack of multi core processing and garbage collection causing stuttery behaviour.
Thunderbird some emails I archived at start of year have vanished.
Thunderbird (with the right addon added) does have better more granular rule system for auto sorting emails.

For reference my point's on outlook is version 2010 fully patched 64bit version running on windows 8.1  I expect the latest outlook on windows 10 does use GCM ciphers.

My phone uses the K9 email client.

Weaver:
Chris, what settings do you use in imap? And could you tell me about the leave-on-server vs delete and offline possibilities you have open to you with imap, if you'd be so kind?

I like Outlook a lot, but Mrs Weaver is all-iOS now. Seeing as so called 'Outlook' iOS is god-knows-what third-party badged thing, so it appears, who knows what it is so I don't see any point paying for it. I'm sticking with Apple's mail client for her because I'm hoping that that might work properly  her needs in terms of functionality are modest, she just needs something reliable and needs 100% integration with the rest of the Apple universe. And I already get paid-for full Apple support for everything anyway.

But I'm wondering if I'm mad sticking with POP simply because it's all I know. I really want to make sure that stuff is downloaded and deleted from the server, but I notice that there is 90MB of stuff sitting on there, so I'm wondering if I somehow ended up getting the app set up to use IMAP accidentally as apparently this is possible because of some strange auto-detect thing it does during setup, something that I was not aware of, and I'm not sure how to tell exactly what it's doing by looking in the settings, need to take another look. (Now I come to think of it, I could do a pcap on a session, if all else fails, to confirm which protocol it's using.)

Anyway, I ought to find out what the story is with IMAP and mail possibly building up on the server, just in case it is using imap.

So the questions boil down to: “Is there anything utterly bad about imap for my purposes?” and, “Does it have any killer advantages, which I am missing out on?”

Ronski:
The killer advantage is if you use multiple devices to read and send email, you can also use webmail.

I used to use POP, I'd check my emails throughout the day on my tablet (Aquamail), but they'd still be on the server for my email client at home to collect, so that would download them, all marked as UNREAD of course, so I was basically doing things twice. If I sent an email from my tablet it would not be in my sent box at home, or vice versa.

Now I've switched to IMAP whatever I read on whatever device is marked as read or deleted no matter which device I use, same goes for if I send an email, it's there on all the other devices sent folders.

This of course does mean ALL mail resides on the server until deleted, the way around that is to archive it, in my case all have to do is get Outlook to archive after X days (I still haven't done this)

Therefore using IMAP is so much easier when you want to access the emails from different devices.

BigJ:
Ronski has pretty much summed it up in my view. I use a mix of IMAP and POP with Thunderbird and K9 on Android. I too periodically archive messages locally. Just to add a bit of flavour, this is how I do things.

With Thunderbird I keep the client in complete sync with the server. Changes Locally reflected on the server.
I've setup K9 on my mobile very differently, only the read state is updated on the server and the folder size is limited to 25 messages (older messages removed on client). Deleting message on K9 doesn't delete them on the server though if I've deleted with Thunderbird, it'll get deleted on K9 at the next sync.

Also you don't need a live internet connection. I sometimes start Thunderbird in off-line by mistake.

Ronski:
I've just set outlook to archive all messages once they are a year old, so those are now stored on my PC but still show up in Outlook and are fully searchable, just in a separate folder to the IMAP ones. Checked via Webmail and anything older than a year had gone, and thus removed from the server.

Incidentally if I don't have an internet connection then all my existing emails are still there in Outlook - so they are stored locally. Aquamail only keeps the last 25 messages, but can download more if so desired so it doesn't end up using loads of space on the tablet.

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