Two good reasons to stick with POP3 email over IMAP

Privacy is another reason to rely on POP3. In this post-Snowden era, many are uncomfortable with keeping personal data like email on a third-party server. Email sitting on a server you don’t control is wide open to access by law enforcement with the right set of warrants.

Keeping your email on your devices, and off of third-party servers, means anyone who wants to look at your email has to come to you and not your email provider.

There are a few weaknesses to that argument, however, since intelligence agencies could still grab your email while it transits the Internet. Your mail provider may also have redundant backup copies of your email that won’t get deleted right away, defeating the whole point of using POP3 for privacy concerns. (Fortunately, it’s possible to encrypt your email.)

Sure, most of us are probably never going to be targets of a police investigation. But for most people these privacy concerns are really about the principle of the issue .

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2838189/two-good-reasons-to-stick-with-pop3-email-over-imap.html