Our central UNet email servers are optimized for IMAP, which is a protocol to let desktop machines receive and display email. With Eudora and POP, each time you connect to the central server, email is copied to your local machine. This slows down the server for everyone, as each time you connect, Eudora has to check the header of each email message in your In box to see whether or not it has been downloaded before. Also, it uses a great deal of disk space on central servers if copies of everyone's email are stored there all the time.
POP also makes it inconvenient to check email from multiple locations.
With POP, if you go to a different computer to check your email, you cannot see the email that was stored locally on your computer before. IMAP solves many of these problems. When you use a program like Netscape Messenger or PINE to read your email, you are essentially using that program as a front end or a window through which you read your email, which remains on the server. This is much more secure and efficient. However, for this to work properly on servers serving thousands of people, we must all be responsible about email storage.