On 31/07/18 02:37 PM, Ronan Chagas wrote:

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That begs the question: why would it be easier if you DID archive everything?

My laptop has 256 GiB of SSD. It is impractical to clone my e-mails archive locally. So, in my laptop, if I want to search for a message and reply to it, I need to go to the online interface, search for the message, somehow send it to me, and then reply. Notice, I still have to access web to do this.

And therein lies the difference between Thee and Mee! (as the saying goes)

Using IMAP I download NOTING (except possibly, in passing, the headers for threading). However I still have access to everything that is still 'current' on the server. What 'current' may mean depends on the ML's algorithm, but generally I see at least a month on the openSUSE lists I subscribe to, and can scroll back that far.

Since the messages NEVER get downloaded from my server account @ my ISP until I explicitly do so or explicitly 'archive' them to either the 'archive' folder' there or to the 'archive' under Dovecot indexing on my home server, this is not a problem.

As for your laptop, well 256G is marvellous coma[red to the 16G I have on my tablet for reading email. So I NEVER EVER download onto the machine I use for reading mail. EVER.

Of course you may have a cheapskate ISP that limits the number of messages you can backlog, the time period or the amount of space. Like they say "YMMV" Also like they say "Here's a nickel kid, get yourself a better computer", Or ISP. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24