Move everything to the inbox. POP only works on the inbox. That is the nature of the protocol.

IMAP synchronizes all folders.

IMAP doesn't save a copy to my drive. I thought Microsoft Live and Eudora would take down all the folders?

marcycn said

IMAP doesn't save a copy to my drive. I thought Microsoft Live and Eudora would take down all the folders?

IMAP saves a copy to your drive, but only to speed things up, I see it more as a cache as mail is removed as soon as it is removed from the server. It is not an immutable copy.

How mail is accessed is through IMAP and POP. There are some proprietary protocols out there. Microsoft exchange has one, IBM's message system has one. But in general for most of us IMAP and POP are the realities of life outside of a corporate environment.

You can get out any mail client you like, but the fundamentals are that the mail arrives in one of those protocols. So regardless of what you thought Eudora or any other mail client did, you are wrong.

I found Mailbird a couple years ago but couldn't get the POP3 working. I finally got that working the other day and when I scanned Gmail for all my messages it took down everything in every folder without moving anything to the inbox. All 6000 plus messages! I just had to tell it to keep scanning until it could find no more messages.

marcycn said

I found Mailbird a couple years ago but couldn't get the POP3 working. I finally got that working the other day and when I scanned Gmail for all my messages it took down everything in every folder without moving anything to the inbox. All 6000 plus messages! I just had to tell it to keep scanning until it could find no more messages.

The RFC for POP is very specific. You experience whatever you feel it to have been will be exactly the same with ALL POP clients. An email client can only 'work within the constraints of the RFC and anything else is simply incorrect assumption.

Here is a link to the RFC at the Internet engineering task force https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1939

I would reverse you "solution" as it is blatantly in error. But I will leave it as it is a common misconception that POP accesses mail in various server folders. When in fact POP knows nothing of folders. But then neither does GMail your chosen provider as Gmail uses labels, not folders. Perhaps that would explain an apparently completely incorrect result with Gmail. Perhaps they download the all mail folder as the mail drop instead of the inbox everyone else does. I have no idea.