You're speaking about 4 years as if that's a long time.. As I said, these things take forever. Yeah I know the benefits of IMAP, but there are very few benefits for ISP's to upgrade. IMAP makes a lot of sense for a school or a business, but not much sense for an ISP. That's why you don't see it much.

Yeah the messages eventually have to get deleted. I have my Eudora at home delete after checking, but when I use PINE or Netscape or whatever other email client from work or school, I set those to leave the mail on server. That's the only sensible way to make it work, have one client that does the deleting, and have the rest just download the mail and don't delete it. Otherwise you'll have some messages on this client, some others on the other client, and it'll be a mess.