I was just thinking about the OP's mention of 5 months' worth of emails gone from the laptop. POP3 give the user the option of physically downloading an email to a device's local storage and then deleting the copy from the main server, which to me is a recipe for disaster.
Yes, I'm not particularly concerned about the work email. I only work a couple of hours a month, so I'm not gonna worry about it.
Regarding the POP3 issue, I have several email accounts, hosted on 2 different hosting services. (Decades ago, someone told me not to have all of my email accounts hosted by the same company, because if it had an outage, I'd be SOL.) If I remember correctly, the 2 hosting services told me how to set up my email accounts, and I just did what they told me to do.
I could certainly contact them and see if I can use IMAP instead of POP3. But I remember that many years ago, I was scolded for leaving messages on the servers, which took up too much space. So I set up my email accounts so that messages stay on the servers for some number of days (maybe 30 days, I'd have to check) and then they're deleted from the servers.
Maybe I should switch to a different hosting service (or two)? I need a service that can hold my hand when I hit a snag. Years ago, one of my email accounts would no longer send or receive email. I spent a lot of time on the phone with someone who apparently expected me to be more knowledgeable, and although I tried to follow his instructions, I just couldn't get the account to work. The guy finally fixed it for me. It worked for quite a while, but eventually stopped working again. I hadn't changed anything. To this day, it doesn't work. I never contacted the hosting service because I didn't want to go through the same crap again. There must be hosting services that cater to people like me. I used to be smarter, and able to figure stuff out. Not so much now.
I'd welcome any suggestions about hosting services, switching to IMAP, etc.