Rethinking IMAP
I've been using IMAP for the last 3 or 4 years now. I used the Mulberry client for quite some time, and then I moved to Mail.app.
I use 5 different IMAP accounts, my anti-spam is client-side, using the wonderful SpamSieve, and right now, all this accounts take 1.5Gb. Of those, 1.3Gb is a single IMAP account that I label archive and that I'm most likely trash in a near future.
I live in my laptop 100% of the time, all the other computers I own are servers of some sort of another. I don't have a laptop/desktop combo, and it's very unlikely I'll ever use such a combo.
Also, eventually, when I upgrade to Tiger, Spotlight will require that all my mail to have a local copy to index it.
The point of all of this is that my email experience is slow. I know that I don't have the world fastest computer (G4 800Mhz) and that Mail.app is probably not the smartest IMAP client out there, but this is getting ridiculous. It keeps "Synchronizing folders with server" and "Caching stuff" but even then it's slow.
So, I don't use any of the features IMAP provide and I'm paying a price for it. I'm going back to POP3...
