Terry, TG> and I believe Dave's TG> assessment is only true for residential ISPs, not enterprises.) As I suspect Terry knows I know, the differences between pop and imap are fundamental. I was making no comment on the utility of imap vs. pop. This is about end-user adoption statistics. i should have said 'enterprises' rather than LANs, since that was what i was trying to highlight. my understanding is that imap has had a large impact on enterprise email access, though I've no idea what percentage of the enterprise POP market it has displaced. but 'residential ISP' is a rather large portion of the Internet and the scale of the whole Internet is the focus of this discussion. TG> People who only use one computer (and who back it up regularly :), may TG> find relatively little benefit to IMAP this is going to take us down a distracting path, but since you mention it, i would have switched to IMAP long ago, for exactly the multi-computer scenario you cite. but i have not come across an email user agent with features I need that also has support for IMAP that works acceptably. TG> Therefore I claim that it is highly incorrect to suggest that IMAP TG> hasn't displaced POP "because from the end user perspective IMAP TG> doesn't provide any clear value over POP", or because it was "all TG> about shifting control of the mail store from the end user into the TG> hands of the mail administrator" --which I can assure you, it was not. well, for many users, pop is just fine, of course. they simply do not need imap. it is also true that residential ISPs tend not to see the business benefit in storing user email. but it is most clearly true that the two protocols provide massively different capabilities and that each can be massively useful. d/ -- Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com> Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com> Sunnyvale, CA USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>