On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 at 08:01, Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
Chris:
And what are some pros and cons switching to IMAP?
And what program do you use on Fedora for your email?
Tom Horsley wrote:
I use fetchmail to download mail from every other mail server onto my home machine, where fetchmail then injects the mail into the dovecot imap server. With dovecot sieve support, I filter the mail into appropriate IMAP folders (or simply discard it). Then I can use any email client to talk to my local IMAP server without having to convert or transfer mail anywhere.
I do the same thing, excepting that I use Evolution as my mail client. But since the mail is on a server, not in my mail client, I can try out alternative clients and not lose any mail. Thus far, Evolution is the least-worst one I've found on Linux.
I have a small LAN, and it's handy to be able to do mail on any computer, and having it all in one server helps with that. I don't really need to do mail away from my LAN. If I did, I could make my mail server publicly accessible, but I'd rather not deal with that security nightmare. The alternative would be to use an external mail service that dragged in all mail from other addresses to it. Plenty offer that feature, or used to (it's years since I looked).
Mail in IMAP has various advantages that POP3 doesn't have.
You can look at the headers of all available messages, and only fetch the ones your interested in (by name, subject, etc). You can filter based on headers (and that's quicker than taking the whole message in and filtering).
IMAP can use folders (aka multiple mailboxes) on the server. I haven't used POP since IMAP2bis arrived in pine -- maybe modern POP3 supports folders. My pre-retirement work often involved sorting out issues on random workstations (back when people had actual offices scattered over a couple floors/buildings) so it was important to have quick access to email via IMAP from whatever workstation was having issues.
A standard way of marking messages as read/unread, etc.
Here, read what someone else has said, instead of me going through them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol