>it immediately deigns to eat 3GB of my laptop's hard disk by downloading and (redundantly) persisting every message I've ever received I saw this too the firs

>it immediately deigns to eat 3GB of my laptop's hard disk by downloading and (redundantly) persisting every message I've ever received I saw this too the first time I set up IMAP. IMAP is (supposed to be) an exact copy of your mailbox. Your surprise might come from the fact that you didn't delete what you thought you did. I ran a pop3 server for a long time and thought my mailbox was fairly small. Then I turned on IMAP and discovered that my pop3 server had never actually deleted any of my mail. It took me 3-5 hours of work to delete everything that was supposed to be deleted again but now setting up new clients (e.g. my phone) are near instant.