The benefit of IMAP is that you can access your mail from more than one place . . .Mail on your laptop, Mail on your desktop, IE from the Windoze box at work, your iPhone, the internet cafe when you're in Tokyo, etc. It's true . . . you have to leave your mail on the server (including your archives) for this to work . . . but IMAP mail space is pretty cheap. If you've got MobileMe . . . you've got a total of 20 GB of space. I don't keep my mail archives on MobileMe but rather on my fastmail.fm account. That only costs me 20 bucks a year for 600 MB (40 bucks a year for 6 GB) . . . I currently have 139 MB of mail archived there for a total of about 15,000 messages. GMail is also a good place to store archived mail . . .it's free but I really don't think much of the non-folder interface they use. I do keep some really old archives on my laptop in Mail . . . but then I rarely need stuff from before 2003 while I'm away from the house. The real nice thing is that it's all available no matter where I am. On Sep 30, 2008, at 12:53, Linda wrote: > On 9/30/08 11:26 AM, Andrew T. Lynch wrote: > >> This is a pretty good description of IMAP vs POP > > I read a bunch of the IMAP vs POP sites before I asked my question. > Now I'm > asking the *benefits* of IMAP. I know what it is, but I can't tell > from all > of these pages what the benefits are. For example, if I want to > access an > email from one year ago, with IMAP I have to leave it on the server, > right? > The server will fill up eventually. I just don't see the benefits of > IMAP > over POP, given how they both work, and was hoping someone could > explain the > benefits of IMAP. > > > _______________________________________________ > X4U mailing list > X4U at listserver.themacintoshguy.com > http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/x4u > > Seven Cent Deals - Great legacy stuff Great Legacy Price > http://www.drbott.com/prod/db.lasso?cat=Seven+Cent+Deal