POP vs IMAP

After being told for several years now that imap is vastly superior to pop3 in all ways, today, knowing I’d probably regret it, I migrated my mail to an imap server.

It’s vastly slower, being dependent on the network for every message access. Opening my mail client takes forever and a weekend, since it has to check a bzillion folders on the server and compare them to whatever local indexes I have.

It’s far less reliable, since, when the network is unavailable, so is my email.

It is a *huge* load on the server, which was somewhat unexpected.

So, perhaps someone could tell me *any* reason why this is better?

Presumably the goal was to be able to access the same boxes with different mail clients from different places, but if this is what I have to put up with to get that tiny feature, I’m just not seeing it.

Is imap actually better for anyone? Why? What’s the advantage?

Sheesh. This is nightmarish.