What ISPs write about IMAP (vs POP3)

[StR]

http://help.suddenlink.com/internet/Pages/POPvsIMAP.aspx#4
Suddenlink (owned by Altice, now the 5th largest cable ISP in the US) says:
"Not all email clients support IMAP".

I am actually curious Is there still an email client that supports POP3 and doesn't support IMAP?
I am not talking about some obsolete long-unsupported programs.

The sad part is that they support the urban legend: "Requires online access to view, delete or change emails."

PS. I think I just found the answer to my question.
This table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients#Communication_and_access_protocol_support
lists three (only 3) email clients that support POP3 and not IMAP: Libremail, mh/nMH, and YAM.
Until now, I have never seen any of them, except the mh (may years ago).
mh is a Unix-shell-based client, YAM is for AmigoOS and variations. (I am guessing how many geeks are still using those two.)

But then, the same table shows Trojita, which can do IMAP but not POP.
So, Suddenlink should've written: Not all clients support POP3.
 

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Trojita has a very very very nice IMAP implementation. Too bad it's still (apparently) limited to one account only.

As for the statement itself -- the ISP is probably too lazy to implement IMAP, or it's too complicated (wonder what'll Verizon do now with their own accounts, now that they're apparently getting Yahoo).

[StR]

It used to be that ISPs were trying to limit the storage space available for mail. As a result, they were "pushing" POP3 as the preferred method. While storage space is not as expensive these days, I suspect many ISPs (except for those who data mine messages, such as Google) might be still conservative on that front (it might be just inertia more then anything: it's working, thus it's good enough.)

As for Verizon, - they had already purchased AOL a year ago; and AOL had (and still has IMAP).
I suspect that if/when they move their users to Yahoo (more likely than AOL at this point, I suspect), they might use what they've inherited.. But then even that is not obvious. The large old companies are slow to go through the merger process. I've seen how a few mergers of that types were happening (when AOL and Sun bought Netscape, when recently WD bought HGST, ..)  When the companies have duplicated structures, it's always a painful (and frequently slow) process.

[Jeff]

The only other app that I put on par with AquaMail (and which I use) that also has such an admirable privacy policy, is Nine, and alas, Nine does *not* support IMAP as of yet.

One of the really nice UI features I really like about Nine is the conversational view has left/right aligned balloons which makes glancing at conversational (threaded) views nice.  See screenshot:

[StR]

You are correct about Nine missing IMAP. In my post above I was looking only at the desktop/laptop e-mail clients.

I've seen that Nine's privacy policy is good. I've never tried it because it has no IMAP, and I need IMAP.

As for the conversations, - I guess, that's more Gmail-like style of presenting them. I understand why some people might like that, but I don't like that. The irony is that, because I didn't like how conversations were organized in Gmail, I was not expecting myself using Aquamail's conversations when Kostya first introduced them. I admit I was wrong.

Regarding the snapshot that you've posted (thank you!), I appreciate the offset (compared to Gmail). However, I wonder if that offset is done for multi-party conversations.
Also, this format works for 1-3-liners... What about conversations with screen-full messages?

Curiously enough, when the "chips" were introduced in Aquamail (Due to Gmail popularity), I turned them off. Did that in Gmail too.