Thunderbird beats Evolution

I recently decided to get my email stored locally in case my internet connection fails and I need them. I used to have them save in Outlook Express (for backup purposes), but I dropped this habbit when I start forwarding everything to Gmail.
I decided to give Evolution a shot and see how it's doing these days. This is mainly because of it's "great integration with Gnome". The overall interface it's not very impressive, and looks like it's an old application. I could have gone along with it, no problem, but something else was a show stopper: I use POP3 and all email clients I used allowed me to "delete email on server when deleted from Inbox". Guess what? Evolution does not have this (again, for POP). It's either "delete emails when retrieving" or "delete after X days". It seems that this feature was requested back in Evolution 1.0 but it was never implemented. I search a lot on forums for an explanation and I found two Evolution developers (back in a 2003 thread):

1. this feature is a POP hack and will not be implemented
2. Evolution is targeted more to enterprise users which use IMAP

My reaction was:

1. is it "hack" to use two POP commands to get a feature implemented? I guess no, since all other clients are doing it. Or maybe, they are all hackers, and Evolution developers are the real-deal.
2. then why "force" it into my new Ubuntu desktop install (like that other half application that tries to replace Pidgin)?

One way or the other, Evolution is purged and Thunderbird is installed on my system (btw, same goes with empathy and pidgin). I care less for "Gnome integration" than I care about functionality.