Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Is disroot ok?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> Haven't you inverted the words POP3 and IMAP?
>
> I mean, I find it way secure and better to use POP3 because I have all
> my email in my own computer, and can yet optionally leave part of the
> newest ones in the server.

You never had such security. By the time you can use any means of reading 
the email your mail server has already seen those emails. This is true 
regardless of the protocol involved. Furthermore you can't undo the fact 
that your server got to read that email before your client got to read it.

If you want to keep your emails from an untrusted email server, stop using 
that server. Pick a server you can trust and use GPG plus an anonymous 
remailer. As far as I know that's about the best you can do with email if 
you want to use their resources to convey messages to you but you don't 
trust their system.

So when it comes to POP3 vs. IMAP, it's really a question of whether you 
want to be limited to one connection (POP3) or be able to use multiple 
concurrent connections (IMAP). This is a show-stopper limitation of POP3. 
With IMAP you could easily leave an email client running at home while you 
take a portable device around with you and keep up with your email 
remotely. Any changes to the account get synchronized across the clients as 
the changes occur.

I'm not sure if POP3 will do new email notification during a POP3 session, 
but I know that IMAP will.

There are good reasons why some service providers don't offer POP3.

> With IMAP, on the other hand, it can turn out to be very expensive also
> for the service provider.

I would need to see your evidence to back up that assertion before I could 
comment on that, however...

> I read OpenMailBox's social network profile posts and it seems that IMAP
> consumed more resources than POP3.
...this doesn't immediately strike me as your problem so it doesn't seem to 
me that this will lead to a valid objection.

If you choose to host something valuable on someone else's computer, it's 
up to them to manage that resource or stop offering protocols they can't 
adequately manage. I don't know what specific problems OpenMailbox is 
talking about but Dreamhost has lots of accounts across many email servers 
all accessible via IMAP and they work quite well.