What is POP3?
POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol 3. One of the differences between IMAP and POP3 is that POP3 is simpler than IMAP. POP3’s only job is to download emails to your smart devices or computer from an email server. Also, POP3 only downloads emails that are in the inbox folder. For instance, it won’t download emails from your spam folder, your draft folder, your sent folder, your deleted emails, etc.
POP3 does not synchronize. This means that once POP3 retrieves emails from an email server, the email server will delete the emails. Therefore, there will be no copy saved on the email server once POP3 has retrieved it.
So, if you have two computers, once one of the computers retrieves your emails from the email server, the other computer will not be able to recover the emails since they have already been deleted
. Benefits of POP3
POP3
- uses bandwidth more efficiently than IMAP. This is especially good if you have slow internet connections.
- There is no limitation on the size of your inbox with POP3.
What is IMAP?
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP allows you to view all your emails that are on the email server from multiple devices. Not only are emails saved on the email server, but IMAP also caches copies of your email across all your devices.
In addition, IMAP synchronizes all folders. Unlike POP3, IMAP synchronizes the inbox folder, sent folder, deleted folder, etc.
When using IMAP, please note that if you delete a recovered email from your smartphone, that email will be automatically deleted from your computer and email server. The same applies when you create a folder, the folder will also automatically appear on your computer and email server.
Benefits of IMAP
- With IMAP, you can easily transfer all your old email files to your new email program if you ever decide to switch email clients. It will only take a few minutes and you can easily download all your emails from the server.
- When you choose an email set up with IMAP in one.com, all your emails will have a copy saved on the mail server. That is, if your computer is broken or stolen, you don’t have to worry about losing your data. Our one.com backup system protects your mail against almost any risk you can imagine.
- Unlike POP3, IMAP saves a copy of your emails. Therefore, IMAP can retrieve emails from the email server multiple times, as a copy of the email will always exist on the server until you decide to delete it.
POP3
vs IMAP POP3 downloads
emails from a
server to a single computer, making those emails only accessible on that specific computer. IMAP stores emails on a server and then syncs them across multiple devices. IMAP is more advanced than POP3 and allows you to access your email from anywhere and on any device.
So which email protocol should you choose?
You should choose POP3 if you only plan to retrieve your email once from a computer or smart device.
Even if you don’t have an internet connection, you can still view your emails using POP3. Also, you will save a lot of storage space on your email server as emails are deleted every time they are downloaded to your device.
You must use IMAP if you use multiple devices
.
IMAP saves a copy of all your emails on the email server, which means you don’t have to worry about losing data. Also, you will be able to see all your folders and they will all look the same on all your devices.
IMAP and
POP3
with one.com Hosting your email
with one.com allows you to easily access your IMAP email accounts from Windows, Linux, and Mac computers, as well as smartphones
.
With our webmail in one.com, you are always guaranteed to read and send emails regardless of which computer you are online from. Choose IMAP for flexible access to all your sent and received emails, and choose POP3 if you just want to have your emails in one place. In one.com we generally recommend using IMAP.
