I used to think that pop3 was a pretty decent way to handle email until i setup courier-imap over at the statehouse. The big difference between the two is that with POP your mail client checks the server and pulls all the mail down to your local machine. With IMAP, the mail always stays on the server. You can create folders, etc through your client right on the server and no matter what imap client you point at your email server, your mail always looks the same. Meaning, if you use a laptop from your easy chair and a desktop in your home office and a desktop at work, you’ve always got the same folder structure, etc. Yes, there’s always pine but Mac OS X’s Mail.app is so nice looking i’ve been shunning my CLI applications.
So given that yahoo mail, my primary personal account, is POP and i don’t expect them to support IMAP at any point in the future I spent a few minutes today setting up fetchmail on the willisbros.net server to grab my mail from yahoo and put it in my willisbros.net imap folders. pretty sweet. This means that all the spamassassin stuff I’ve got setup on w. . b.net get’s applied to my yahoo mail. i’ve received exactly 2 pieces of spam in the past 48 hours since i intergrated razor2 into spamassasin. I guess perl is good for *something*.
My biggest problem is that Mail.app seems to have some trouble moving folders across imap servers. At least I think it’s Mail.app and not courier-imap that’s causing the problems.