this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
50 points (100.0% liked)
Tech
2445 readers
16 users here now
A community for high quality news and discussion around technological advancements and changes
Things that fit:
- New tech releases
- Major tech changes
- Major milestones for tech
- Major tech news such as data breaches, discontinuation
Things that don't fit
- Minor app updates
- Government legislation
- Company news
- Opinion pieces
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
IIRC, POP3 downloaded all emails to local device. If you have more than one device, the first one gets it all and the second or more see nothing.
IMAP kept the messages on the server so there was one source of truth and multiple devices could access the same emails.
Most email clients support both. There are probably some people still running old POP3 clients, or they set it up one way and never bothered to change.
Not sure why gmail would care. Code's been working for decades. Unless there are security considerations not worth mitigating.