Never said "good old days". POP3 and IMAP were not part of the original design of email. The point of difference between then and now worth considering, IMO,

Never said "good old days". POP3 and IMAP were not part of the original design of email. The point of difference between then and now worth considering, IMO, is that the ISP's business plan was not personal data mining and online advertising services, it was internet service. Perhaps it is a mistake to attribute improvements in syncing solely to the existence of a gigantic webmail service run by an online ad services company. There have been vast improvements in computers and networks since then. What was arguably "good" about the "old days" was a relative absence of third party middlemen trying to make money from online advertising, and investing in surveillance as a "business model". As for spam filtering, I agree. However I do not think "webmail" hosted by a third party is the final solution to the problems with email. The original SMTP-to-SMTP design used on a LAN overlay performs very well and attracts no spam, for example.