Should i use imap or pop

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Grab a cup of coffee and try again in a little bit. Have questions? With IMAP, the message does not remain on the local device, such as a computer, it remains on the server. With POP3 mail, it will connect and attempt to keep the mail located on the local device computer or mobile. Pop3 vs. For instance, if you delete an email on one device, that deletion doesn't sync to the server, so other devices will still have that message. And since each device downloads every message from the server, it's easy to end up with a bunch of duplicates and not know what you've already dealt with.

Downloading every message from your POP account can use up a lot of space on your device, depending on how much mail you have. A lot of POP use today is to access mailboxes provided by your ISP, web hosting company, or similar, which tend to suffer from extremely limited storage. As mentioned earlier, IMAP was created to allow remote access to emails stored on a remote server. The idea is to allow multiple clients to manage the same inbox, which is in line with how most people use email today.

So whether you log in from your home or work computer, you will always see the same emails and folder structure, since they are stored on the server. All changes you make are immediately synced to the server, so you don't have to worry about confusing duplicated inboxes. While an internet connection is needed to access mail using IMAP, it's still possible to work offline and sync changes when you're back online.

Thus, you may need to clean out your email often if you have lots of messages in your account. There's a good chance that you'll want to access your email from at least two devices, and doing so with POP is a huge headache.

Since every email service worth its salt supports both, there are no compatibility concerns. In addition to email, MAPI can sync other data like calendars and contacts. Related: Hotmail Is Dead! Microsoft Outlook Email Services Explained. If you use Outlook on your computer at work, or if your company has email powered by Microsoft , you'll use Exchange for your email protocol.

Remember that if you use webmail, the service handles all this, so you don't have to think about it. But next time you set up a new email app on your phone or computer, you'll know how both of these protocols handle mail. There's a lot more to learn about how email works, including the security measures built into modern messaging. IMAP only downloads a message when you click on it, and attachments aren't automatically downloaded. This way you're able to check your messages a lot more quickly than POP.

POP works by contacting your email service and downloading all of your new messages from it. Once they are downloaded onto your PC or Mac, they are deleted from the email service. This means that after the email is downloaded, it can only be accessed using the same computer.

If you try to access your email from a different device, the messages that have been previously downloaded won't be available to you. If you've used Gmail, Outlook. To get to your webmail account, you access the Internet and sign in to your email account. Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird are email apps : programs that you install on your computer to manage your email. They interact with an email service such as Gmail or Outlook.

You can add any email account to your email app for it to manage your email. For example, you can add webmail accounts - Gmail, Outlook.

When you add your email account to your email app, it will usually attempt to set it up with IMAP access, without any input from you. If the email app has difficulty adding your email account, it's usually because the email account is set up for POP access.