POP3 vs IMAP

POP3 and IMAP are the protocols that email services use to receive incoming email,

• POP3 - Post Office Protocol 3 - This is the most popular
• IMAP - Internet Message Access Protocol - Is gaining popularity since most people manage their mail from several locations.

How are they different?

POP3 the email client or device contacts the mailbox and downloads the contents of the Inbox to its own local storage area. Then the mail will only exist in that local storage area and would not be available to be downloaded by another email client or device.

Tip: Most clients and devices do allow you to enable a setting to ‘keep a copy of the email on the mail server’ This would allow them to be download to multiple clients or devices if required.

When using IMAP with a client or device they will simply connect to the mailbox and display the full mailbox to you without actually downloading the content to local storage. This has the benefit of allowing you to manage your mailbox from multiple clients and devices and seeing the same content.

Which should I use?

Which protocol you should use depends mainly on how you will be accessing and managing your email. If you are likely to be viewing your mail from multiple locations, clients or devices then It is usually best to use IMAP. IMAP will allow you to manage your mailbox from all of these different locations and clients while the actual mailbox content remain on a FatCat Servers mail server.

NOTE If you were to use POP3 with the ‘Keep a copy on the server’ setting enabled , you are basically creating multiple copies of your mailbox. Management of the mail into sub folders would need to be repeated on each individual client.

If you are simply going to be using one email client then POP3 would be the way to go. This provides a simple service to allow you to download all of your mail to one location managed by you.

Use IMAP if:

• You download mail from multiple devices
• You save a lot of email
• You save mail to different sub folders and need to view from all devices

Use POP3 if:

• You usually check mail with one or two devices
• You usually read then discard mail
• You check mail from several devices , but have only one that you store and organize mail