Artie, as you have demonstrated your method will work. I started to mention it before, but decided not to complicate the issue. It will work, but it does create additional work because all messages have to be separately "managed" on every device you are using. With IMAP managing the messages on any one device performs the same operation on all devices accessing the IMAP account.
Many years ago, before IMAP became ubiquitous, and before I had so many different email capable devices, I used to do the same thing but with at least four and often five different active email accounts, managing the content on my various computers was taking way too much time. Add in iPhone and iPad and it was really annoying. Admittedly I resisted IMAP for a good while because it was not what I was used to, but .mac finally won me over to IMAP and now I would not go back to POP unless it were the only possible option.
