Campfire Time wrote:
That assumes he's using IMAP and not a POP3 server. Oddly enough there's still a lot of POP3 out there.
The web has a bit of mis-information regarding IMAP vs POP3.
IMAP stores messages on the server forever (afaik) and so does POP3 - the difference is that POP3 allows the user choices to store messages forever, or for a set period of time, and allows the user to download from different machines. I set Thunderbird to delete messages left on the server that are 90 days old (the downloaded messages remain on my computer). I prefer that compared to IMAP.