What’s the difference between POP and IMAP for email accounts?

Email Accounts, IMAP Mail, POP3 Mail, Set up the email as POP or IMAP?

Most users communicate daily via email from various devices, but many don’t know the differences in protocols for setting up an email account.

POP3 (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two main protocols for email setup.

 

1. POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3)

This protocol lets users download emails to one or more devices. Once downloaded, emails can be accessed without an internet connection.

When setting up your email account as POP, there’s an option to delete messages from the server, either at the time of download or after a few days. If this option is enabled, messages won’t clutter your server and won’t take up space on your web hosting.

The disadvantages of this protocol are:

  • Sent messages are only visible in the Sent Items folder of the device they were sent from. Similarly, any changes or deletions to folders will only be reflected on that device. Therefore, if you have the email account set up on multiple devices, you must repeat any deletion or change on each device.

 

2. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)

The key difference from the previous POP3 protocol is that messages and folders are stored on the server, and actions like deleting, moving, or reading are performed directly on the server. This ensures that all changes you make to your email account are visible on all devices where it is configured.

Advantages:

  • They keep your emails synchronized across different devices.
  • It lets you create folders on the server to organize your emails, making them visible on all devices.
  • Multiple users can be connected simultaneously, or one person can access from multiple locations.
  • If there’s a failure on your local computer or any other device, you can always recover lost data from the server.
  • It enables you to search messages using keywords.

Disadvantages:

  • The main disadvantage of this protocol is the need to have a continuous internet connection to review messages.
  • The fact that emails are stored on the server means that this protocol tends to fill the space allocated for its hosting.
  • If you delete a message, there will be no way to recover it, as it has been removed from the server.