Using classic Outlook for Windows in business environments
I don't believe the POP protocol is being deprecated by Microsoft, but I will also never use "New Outlook" for the same reasons as far as privacy and security is concerned as outlined in its Terms that gives them rights to all your data, including NON-MS accounts as it functions as a proxy. I switched from POP to IMAP years ago to protect myself from data loss from local hardware failure back when Outlook Express/Windows Live Mail was what Microsoft offered, but I also made the move to archive all mail in Gmail, moving hundreds of thousands of messages as Microsoft now has 1/3 the storage as Gmail and at that time Gmail allowed far more nested folders than Outlook.com. Perhaps this is no longer the case, but I will never go back. I now have message filters in Thunderbird that moves all messages out of Microsoft email accounts into Gmail for archival, so I use zero Microsoft storage and will not pay them for any either. At that time, I had no way to automate transfer of my POP folders so I had to manually create them on the IMAP server. This was tedious to say the least. Anyway, while I am not familiar with transferring local POP data out of Outlook xxxx, you should be able to continue using POP with a different client such as Thunderbird. The trick will be getting your folders and data in another client.