this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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I've used that on automated systems. No need to worry about email quota and everything incoming is single-use input for other systems so there's no need to store messages on the mail server. Sure, you could do that with imap too, but pop3 clients usually don't leave messages on the server by default, so there's no need to delete them separately.
Other case might be to pull the emails from email provider servers so that provider can't use your emails later. For example if you're an journalist you might not want to have your emails stored with a 3rd party. Or maybe you're using some free tier email provider with a very limited quota, which was generally the use case for pop3 before everyone got practically unlimited quota.
On my personal account I of course use imap since I've got multiple devices but pop3 isn't quite dead yet.
You can do this with IMAP as well, you just need to delete and expunge the emails. Any good email client or library will have an option for this.
POP is literally just downloading all the emails, then deleting them. That's it.
You can't have a script that only downloads emails that match a search (for example emails from a particular sender), since POP doesn't support search. A basic use case is to check for bills/invoices from certain companies and import them into an accounting system, while leaving other emails untouched.
You can't receive emails in real-time and have to instead poll, since POP doesn't support real time notifications. IMAP supports IMAP IDLE.
If you have rules that filter emails into folders, you can't download them via POP, as it doesn't support folders.
For automated systems, if you don't want to store the emails, you can configure the email server to pipe the emails directly to a script. That way they're not stored at all, and your script gets them immediately rather than having to poll.
Yes, as I mentioned, but it's still extra step you need to manage. Not a big one, but extra step anyways.
Which is not always an option. You could have the script running on your laptop which isn't always connected, for example.
I'm well aware of the differences. I'm just saying that there's still use cases where pop3 has it's benefits over imap and discarding it as an 'old technology' isn't always the best route. I'm running my own email server for friends and family and I still have pop3 enabled just in case someone has one of those scenarios where it makes sense to use it.