[mdwh2]

One problem is that it's not backwards compatible when you're using multiple clients. There's the new "recent" mode, which has it's advantages. But I dislike that GMail (and now VM) don't preserve the correct standard POP behaviour, in that when an email client tells the server to delete an email after downloading, it ignores it, and doesn't delete it!

I know there's the email setting to delete emails after accessing via POP, but that's a server side setting that applies to all clients, so you can no longer set it on a per-machine basis. My old way of working was that I'd download everything and delete from server on my main machine, but I sometimes would check the messages on the server via laptop or phone, which would be instructed to leave emails on the server after downloading. Although in some ways recent mode has advantages, the point is there seems no reason to change the old behaviour, and disobey the client command to delete an email.

A related downside is that some might have privacy concerns about their entire email history being stored on a server. The only way round this is to periodically log in and manually delete yourself.

GMail is generally good, but forcing a non-backwards-compatible change on people with hardly any notice (I didn't know at all until I wondered why my emails weren't downloading correctly - now I've had to spend an evening sorting it out; I might have seen their warning message if it didn't get lost in all the spam they send us...) is not so good. Seems typical of VM - take a good solution, but still arse it up in their own implementation. Plus there's the point that GMail is free for anyone anyway, so they can hardly tout it as an advantage - anyone who preferred GMail already had the choice to use it. So perhaps the flipside to this question is: what's the upside?