Setting up email with IMAP or POP?

As all professional, you want to come across as professional as possible. Setting up email with IMAP or POP may seem a bit daunting at first, but read thru this post. It’s not as tough as it sounds.

First, WHY?

When people go to your contact page or sign up for a newsletter, I must say, it is much better to see:

info@joycebragdonstudio.com

then:

joycebragdon@gmail.com

Most modern email clients allow you to choose which delivery method you would like to use to receive your email, while services like Gmail allow you to use a web interface, as well as POP or IMAP. These two protocols exist out of necessity, and together they support a number of workflows that allow you to choose the best way to interact with email.

Let’s explain

Using POP3

The Post Office Protocol (POP) allows you to use your Inbox, as the name suggests, like a post office. The email leaves the sender and arrives in your Inbox without being stored on a server anywhere. In its default setting, you can have email live on your PC or phone and nowhere else. There are settings that allow you to store copies of the message on your email providers server, but this is often not included in the default configuration. Once you have received an email, you have the message stored locally. You could be offline, completely disconnected from the internet, and still have access to the complete message.

The biggest downside to POP is if you don’t have the server configured to store your email. If you download all of your email locally and something happens to your computer, you’ve lost those messages forever.

Because storage is cheap everywhere now, and email takes up very little space (for most people), there’s not a good reason not to store your messages on the server. If you’re using POP in a smartphone and it’s filled with music or games, then storage may become an issue. For most users, however, storage is something that we have an abundance, so storing your email locally is a great way to make sure you always have access to your email.

Using IMAP

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) allows users to access email from anything, or anywhere. As long as you have the username and password, you’re all set. With IMAP, the email lives on the server. You have access to some basic information about every email in your Inbox. Interacting with the email, the email is temporarily downloaded but not really stored on the machine being used.

The biggest benefit to IMAP is the ability to quickly access your email from just about any device. As long as you have a decent internet connection you’re never more than a moment away from your entire inbox.

Unfortunately, without a fast connection or without internet entirely, you’ll have to wait till you can hit a hotspot. Most IMAP clients grab a week or two of email headers and store that information locally. That is grab without images or attachments. If you need to search your inbox, and that email is more than a few weeks old, the headers for your email may skip entire weeks of received messages until you’re connected to the net.

Choose wisely, but switching is easy

The POP vs. IMAP debate is all about how you interact with your email. If you need access to  attachments and use it like file storage system, POP will guarantee your information. Constantly connected to a broadband or LTE network and you flit back and forth between a laptop, desktop, tablet, and smartphone?  IMAP would most likely be the best thing for you.

In most cases, you won’t normally notice a difference between the two services.

There’s also nothing that says you have to pick one and stick with it. Even Gmail, one of the most popular free email services in the world, makes it easy to choose POP or IMAP. Gmail even allows you to switch between them as you see fit.

Your email should exist as a service that requires very little maintenance and configuration once it has been setup and used.