What’s the difference between POP3 and IMAP?
Use IMAP rather than POP3
Reason for using IMAP over POP3
These days most people like to retrieve their e-mail from their desktop computer AND their smart device, mobile phone, tablet and phablet etc. Using IMAP ensures that what they see, whichever device they’re picking their e-mail up from is uniform and consistent.
Firstly, POP3 and IMAP are the two most popular formats for delivering e-mail. (There are others).
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) provides your e-mail from it’s own mail server. Your e-mail is on this server that you refer to when you view your e-mail.
Notes:
- IMAP email access coordinates between the server and your chosen mail application. Messages that have been read/deleted/replied to will be marked as such on your mail server.
- POP3 does NOT mark any of your messages as read/deleted/replied to etc. The mail server holds your messages until you retrieve them. Retrieving them removes them from the mail server.
- Outgoing mail is sent using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).
- It’s highly recommended to use POP3 or IMAP over SSL/TLS since they provide increased security for your interactions with your mail server.
(SSL Secure Sockets Layer and TLS Transport Layer Security)
You can access (look at) your e-mail in a number of different ways.
- Through webmail services such as Round cube, Horde or Squirrelmail etc. These often reside on the server that hosts your e-mail. A standard way to locate YOUR webmail e-mail is to open your browser and type your (url) followed by /webmail i.e. “http://www.yourwebsite.com/webmail”
- Through a web based e-mail client that requires you to have an account with them first. GMail, Hotmail (now Outlook), Yahoo etc.
- Through an e-mail client such as Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Entourage or Apple Mail etc.
- Through an online webmail service such as Mail2web, EMol (Although I would investigate their terms and conditions first)
NOTE: web based e-mail clients such as GMail routinely automatically scan your e-mails for content and keywords and phrases. In this way they can target advertising to you.
My preference would be to set-up IMAP accounts and have my customers retrieve their e-mail from their preferred e-mail client.
If the customer was away from the office they could pick their e-mail up from their own webmail by going online and typing “http://www.yourwebsite.com/webmail”. This using Horde or Squirrelmail etc.
They could integrate more easily their mail into their Smart phone, Phablet or Tablet as IMAP is slightly easier to configure on these devices.
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