Thought About Moving to IMAP from POP3 – Decided Against it
IMAP vs POP3 - classic debate these days. IMAP has 'push' email, POP3 doesn't. Pop3 is old, IMAP it new. GMail is using IMAP now... MobileMe is using IMAP... Everyone is using IMAP - or so they might have us all believe. So I looked into it this morning and decided that POP3 is really quite good enough for me.
First, I had to see if the email servers I hit supported IMAP. First, Google's GMail - Yup. Next, HostMonster - Yup. Lastly, Comcast - Nope. Shucks... we'll, 2 out of 3 isn't bad. I could still move those two to IMAP. And then I started looking at the security of IMAP - just to be safe.
See... I use POP3 and SMTP over SSL to all my mail servers. I simply do not want my mail snatched as I send or receive it. Sure, from server to server it's all in plaintext, but that's going to take a lot more effort on the part of the "snooper" to intercept a major ISP's email. Sure, they can do it, but it's harder. For the last several years, I've been using POP3/SMTP over SSL and have been very happy with it. Every mail server I've needed supports it... and it's just plain secure.
IMAP is plaintext. Period. I'm not a big fan of plaintext passwords and the logins to GMail and Comcast are the logins to my accounts there. So if they snoop it once, they are golden for those accounts. I don't like that.
So I'm going to stick with POP3/SMTP over SSL. It would have been nice, but it's just not something I'm willing to compromise on at this time. Security of my email comes first.