The whole point of IMAP is to keep mail on the server, and the client is essentially a user interface. Some client authors can't get over the POP based idea of a message access protocol being a sort of reverse-SMTP.
I don't want to start a flame war or something here, but it seems like the client-as-UI-only model is a good idea but not yet practical in many situations. Since many users are faced with (a) ISPs whose systems they might reasonably be less likely to trust than their own for things like data security and backup, (b) ISPs who don't give them enough disk space to store all their messages if they choose to keep most of their mail for archival purposes, and (c) situations where they may switch ISPs periodically and want to keep their mail interaction as is, the idea of keeping a master copy on one client computer seems like a valid one, practically if not in the abstract. I'm grappling with this issue now because I like IMAP and would like to switch my own accounts over to it, but at the very least the lack of support in most IMAP clients for situation (b) above prevents me: I would have to divide many of my mailboxes into an online "current" part and an offline "archive" part, whereas what I'd love to have is a single mailbox where older mail remains on the client only.
I suppose I'm a bit off topic at this point though...
--Dave
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David A. Feldman
User Interface Designer
http://InterfaceThis.com
