I am SO HAPPY to be back to an IMAP based mail system! The thunderbird mail reader rocks. Now I can click on links in my email reader and it does intelligent things; I don\'t have to open up a scp session every time I want to send someone a picture or file, life is good.
My hosting company Hurricane Electric while having a rather full UNIX environment has never offered anything beyond pop3. pop3 is okay for casual users, but I like the ability to keep my mail more elegantly synchonized between the server and whichever client computer I happen to be using at the moment. I\'ve bitched about it to no avail. They probably don\'t want users to be constantly connected to a service (IMAP) on their server; so instead they deal with me constantly ssh\'ed in using pine.
Now I\'m forwarding my mail to my colo server (as well as archiving locally); my colo box runs secure imap and voila, I have email again!
Why does a sharp techie like me depend on a hosting company\'s server for his domain? Pretty simple, if I\'m wandering around mexico for a month I can hardly read my mail much less deal with software/hardware screwups on my servers. It\'s worth it to me to have someone else deal with that headache and ensure that my domain \'just works\'.