What can POP3 users do if their email provider forces a server-side spam folder on them?

Question

I use the Thunderbird email client to receive my email via POP3 protocol from my email service provider GMX. I never needed and never used a spam filter. I have been very happy with this setup for all my life.

But now (June 2024) GMX has removed the checkbox to deselect the spam filter from its web interface, thereby forcing its server-side spam filter and spam folder on all users. (Their goal is to drive users away from email clients to the GMX mail app and/or to GMX webmail where the company can make more money with ads.)

Consequently, GMX suggests 3 "solutions" to POP3 users for this self-created problem:

• use the GMX mail app instead of your email client
• use the GMX webmail interface instead of your email client
• use IMAP instead of POP3

So the question is: What can POP3 users do to receive the emails (including many false positives to make matters worse) which GMX now automatically moves to a separate spam folder ?

• To my knowledge POP3 retrieves email only from INBOX of the mail server. All other folders are invisible to POP3. Or is there a trick or ... ANYTHING ... I can do to solve the problem using POP3 alone ?

• Assuming this is impossible using POP3 alone, what is the solution if I want to solely use my email client (and not GMX's webmail or mail app) ?

  • I suppose I have to add an IMAP email account to Thunderbird pointing to the same email address. But how can these 2 email accounts be configured, so that first the POP3 email account downloads all emails from the GMX inbox and only in a subsequent second step the IMAP account downloads the emails from the GMX spam folder (without negatively interfering with each other) ?

  • The obvious solution would be to get rid of POP3 altogether and just use IMAP instead. But I don't think there is a way to configure IMAP in such a way that it behaves like POP3, or is there? My sole requirement is: Move all emails from the web server to my local storage (i.e. download emails + delete them from the web server in the same step). But I don't suppose this to be possible with IMAP. Or is it?

My preference would be (in this order):

1. finding a solution using POP3 alone
2. but if that's impossible, please tell me how to configure IMAP so that it behaves like POP3 (as described above)
3. and if that's also impossible, please tell me how to configure IMAP as an additional/secondary companion email account in order to retrieve the mails from the GMX spam folder in addition to the POP3 account downloading the emails from the GMX inbox. How do these 2 email accounts have to be set up in the email client (Thunderbird) so that they don't get in the way of each other ?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Create a new account in Thunderbird of type IMAP. Follow the settings pretty much like you would have done for POP3.

You may need to switch your POP3 settings to prevent deletion of collected messages. (Thunderbird does have such a switch, "Keep messages on server".)

When you're happy that all is working, move across to the IMAP account and disable the now-obsolete POP3 account. If necessary use Thunderbird to copy messages from your old POP3 mail account folder(s) to the corresponding folder(s) in your new IMAP mail account.

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As a complete alternative you could use a different tool to grab the appropriate folders using IMAP. I have not investigated this for more than a few minutes, but it might be possible to adapt one of these to copy and delete much like POP3 was expected to do. These are more likely to be Linux-based than for Windows, but if you use these as a starting point you may get a useful solution.

• Offline IMAP
• Backup and restore IMAP mail account