> In general I find that most people who have (or claim) a productive workflow sync their mail locally (rather than letting the client connect directly over IMA

> In general I find that most people who have (or claim) a productive workflow sync their mail locally (rather than letting the client connect directly over IMAP). So decoupling your reader application from your mail fetching application. Can't speak for others but when I was using mutt this is indeed what I was doing. It's just way, way easier, there are no IMAP quirks to jump through and you get excellent offline functionality pretty much for free.