Re: [Evolution] Fwd: Mail in Evolution disappearing - mystery deepens



On Wed, 2015-12-02 at 13:21 -0500, dave boland wrote:
Am I correct in thinking POP did download the messages for local
storage?

Correct.  This is the major difference between POP and IMAP.

POP is a simple delivery facility for email: when you access it it
downloads the entire mailbox from the server to your local system then
(by default) deletes the content on the server.  So your local system's
version is the one true version of your mail that has already been
delivered.  Some POP servers support options to not delete the content
on the server, but that means they'll all get downloaded again next
time.  Also you can't "upload" things to a POP server so information
like what messages you've replied to, what's been deleted, etc. cannot
be updated on the server.  It all exists only on your local system.

IMAP is fundamentally different: the master copy of mail is left on the
IMAP server and your local mail client interacts with the server to
perform actions like retrieve mail, delete mail, move messages between
mailboxes, etc.  This lets you have multiple mail clients access mail
and see a relatively up-to-date view of your mail.  It also means that
any messages stored locally on your system are merely cached there for
performance reasons, and you can delete your local disk cache and they
will not be lost.  But of course, once something is deleted on the
server you can't access it any more locally, usually, unless you've made
a backup.

There are lots of articles on the web about the differences too.

Cheers!


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