Huh! what’s that Doc, what’s the difference between pop3 or imap?
Well one of my previous posts (Configuring outlook express) gave you the instructions to configure your mail connection using outlook express. In case I didn’t tell you, the configuration was set up using POP3 and just to make you a bit cleverer with words this stands for “Post Office Protocol 3”
There is another e-mail protocol that you can also use called IMAP. Making you even more clever this stands for “Internet Message Access Protocol” You really didn’t want to know this so lets just stick with POP3 and IMAP.
What is the difference between these two, I bet you would love to know. Well I am not going to get too technical here, I may even confuse myself. All I know is that ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) love POP3 and hate IMAP. So here goes.
Lets first talk about servers and clients, there are lots of different ones out there but we will just talk about “mail servers” and “mail clients” In the normal case the ISP runs the mail server and your PC runs the mail client. There are lots of different mail clients, guess what yours is called, I bet you guess right “outlook express”. We will just call the ISP’s mail server, mail server because we don’t really care what they call it. Now that is out the way and you have got a bit more useless information lets get down to talking about POP3 and IMAP.
POP3.
POP3 is the protocol that allows outlook express to access your ISP’s Mail Server and download any mail to your hard disk that is not currently on the hard disk on your PC. That’s it. Wow that wasn’t hard was it? But it doesn’t stop there. Depending how outlook express is configured the email on the mail server may get deleted once it is downloaded. Most times you can configure your outlook express to tell the mail server not to delete any mail for so many days or delete it immediately or if delete it in outlook express. Some ISP’s do not give you much choice they will delete it after a certain period anyway after they know you have downloaded your mail
Why do they do this? Well they do not want all this mail clogging up their hard disks, besides that, they usually limit the amount of space you are allowed to use on their hard disks. Some of them are not very nice about it either. If you fill up your quota on their disk they stop receiving e-mail for you. Not very nice. Some are a bit nicer and start deleting the oldest messages to make room for new ones.
That’s life folks. Lets talk about IMAP.
IMAP.
IMAP is almost the reverse of POP3. All your mail is kept on the Mail Server and any new mail is download to your PC as well. Can you see now why ISP’s don’t like IMAP. Your right, they have to maintain enough disk space to keep all your mail. So much so that most of them do not allow IMAP.
So what are the benefits of IMAP over POP3.
Answer these two questions.
- 1. If you are using POP3 and you lose all your mail on your PC for whatever reason, how do you recover your mail?
- If you are using IMAP and you lose all your mail on your PC for whatever reason, how do you recover your mail.
Well for number one you don’t, unless you have saved your mailboxes periodically and most people don’t.
For number two all you have to do is reconfigure outlook express again and hey presto all your mail is back again. I assume that this is obvious to you why.
It is unfortunate that ISP’s limit the use of IMAP as other advantages are.
- You can have multiple PC’s configured and receive exactly the same mail on each. This is useful if you have a desktop and a laptop you can get the same e-mail on each. Also useful for businesses who need several people to access the same mailbox.
- You can have several IMAP e-mail accounts and access all of them in the same window. With POP3 you have to switch between each Identity.
So there you are. You now know heaps more than you did at the beginning of this post.
If you have your own webhost you do not have the limitations as with an ISP, configure as many e-mail accounts as you need with as much space as you need. My next post will explain how to configure an IMAP account on outlook express.