You could almost certainly continue using POP. But with IMAP, moving messages to Local Folders on the desktop is the nearest equivalent to how POP works. Doing so gives you a permanent private copy and removes it from the server. If you want to keep a message then do not delete it on the laptop. It will go away of its own accord when you attend to it on the ďesktop machine. I work it the other way round. I use IMAP and all my messages are visible and accessible on my desktop, my own laptop, my computer at work and also on my phone and tablet. Portable devices are quite smart at choosing what to store locally and what to download on demand. If I don't need to keep a message, I can delete it immediately regardless of which device I am using at that moment (whereas with POP you'd have to delete it on every machine until you got round to deleting the server copy.) The phone and tablet are hopeless for dealing with spam and Junk, but I can pop stuff into the Junk folder to be dealt with in Thunderbird if I want to do more than just delete it on sight.