It can be a little confusing to learn about different ways to get email on your phone or in an email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook, but this breakdown of the key differences between POP and IMAP should help you decide which way to go.
There are two ways your devices and clients can communicate with your Mail server:
1. A one-way communication path (POP). Your device asks the email server for data and pulls it from the servers — but that’s it. Things you do on your device have no effect on the server.
2. A two-way communication path (IMAP). Unlike with POP, your devices talk back to our servers and sync your changes automatically with IMAP. When you sign in to your mail account in a web browser, actions you’ve taken on your email client or mobile device will also appear in your mail account. This all happens automatically once you set up IMAP, so you don’t have to read or sort all your mail twice. This is really helpful when accessing mail from multiple devices.
The advantages of POP include:
- Minimum use of connect time; an issue if you pay by the minute
- Minimum use of server resources
- More software is currently available for POP than for IMAP
The advantages of IMAP include:
- Access to your inbox from any location on the network
- Access to your inbox from different computers
- Faster start-up time, as only message headings are transferred initially
- Optimization for low-speed links
- Ability to handle very large messages
- Ability to fetch individual MIME attachments
- Ability to access non-email information
- As you can see, the benefits of IMAP clearly outweigh those of POP
Do let us know which method do you prefer to fetch Email on your desktop? IMAP or POP?
