Setting up your e-mail shouldn’t be this hard.
Are you excited about the new laptop you bought? Playing with your new tablet? Well it’s all fun and games until someone gets POP-ed. That’s right: we’re going to talk about POP and IMAP.
Don’t be ashamed that you have no idea what that means; for most of my life I have closed my eyes and selected my email settings randomly and hoped for the best.
And really, why in the world does setting up something as ubiquitous as email require logarithmic trigonometry and advanced programming skills?
First things first: We recommend that our customers use IMAP for all of their devices, in most cases. If you are not sure whether to select IMAP or POP when you buy a new phone or change computers: choose IMAP.
But what is the difference? When should I choose POP instead? Please make me a POP/IMAP guru so that I can impress my friends (and find my emails)!
Don’t worry; that’s why I’m here. Let’s go:
Any email that is sent to or from your FRII address is first sent to our servers here at FRII. Your computer has to talk to our servers anytime it processes new mail. Choosing either IMAP or POP in your email settings changes how your device interacts with our server.
IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol
IMAP allows you to view, read, move, or delete emails on our server.
The changes you make (marking an email as unread, for instance, or moving a message from the junk folder into the inbox) will be saved on the server here. If you access your email from another computer, those changes will have been saved and you will see them even when you are using a different device. In fact, you will see the same thing from any device that is configured with IMAP authentication since the messages and changes are all saved on our servers.
Easy enough.
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol, but it might as well stand for Infernal Malted Ape Pasta because “Internet Message Access Protocol” is really not very informative.
POP – Post Office Protocol
POP, however, stands for Post Office Protocol, which is very informative: Using an account configured as POP is like a PO Box at your local Post Office.
When you receive snail-mail, you go to the post office and grab all of the letters in your box and take them home. If your roommate goes to the post office after you, he won’t see any of the letters that have already been taken home, but perhaps he will grab a new letter that arrived after you left.
Getting mail via post is similar to getting e-mail via POP.
POP works in the same way. Instead of viewing messages on our server, POP downloads any messages to the device configured with POP and then deletes those messages from our server. Because the messages are no longer on the server, any changes that are made are only saved on the device that downloaded the emails. If two devices are using POP authentication for the same email address, the devices will not see the same messages. They will only see messages that were downloaded to each respective device.
The plot thickens…
The advantage of IMAP is also its disadvantage. IMAP views and syncs every detail about every message in your inbox and all associated folders. This is not a problem with a few hundred emails, but all that traffic starts to add up if there are thousands of emails saved on the server.
When too many messages (very dependent on your local connection speed) are being kept on the server and accessed via IMAP, your device may time-out before it is able to load all of the necessary information. Emails will start to load very slowly, and sometimes the inbox will even appear to have zero messages before they all magically reappear after a few refresh attempts.
The solution in this case is either to remove congestion from the server (by deleting unneeded messages or archiving old emails to your computer) OR configure one dedicated device (preferably a desktop) as – a POP account.
WHAT??? Now you want me to use POP?!
Yes, you heard me right. Here is a special instance that may be the best fit for you now that you are a FRII Certified POP/IMAP Guru™.
Some POP mail clients allow the user to keep messages on the server for a set number of days before they are deleted. Those messages will be visible to devices using IMAP authentication until the time limit is up, even though the main device is configured as POP.
With this type of POP configuration, you can choose how long to save messages on the server.
This is a great compromise between POP and IMAP.
The most recent messages (usually two weeks’ worth) are on the server and thus visible to all IMAP devices. Messages older than two weeks are stored only on the desktop, which frees up space and allows the IMAP devices to connect without having to access large amounts of data. Any device that is intentionally set to POP should be backed up frequently. If that computer dies without a backup, all your precious emails will die along with it. FOR-EV-ER.
Conclusion
Most of us on the interwebs use multiple devices to view our emails. I get emails on my phone, my laptop, my desktop, my watch, my brain implant, etc. When all those devices have been configured using IMAP, I will see the same emails no matter what device I use. However, if the devices are configured as POP, or a combination of the two, things start to get messy. But that shouldn’t be a problem for you!
Now that you understand the difference between the two email protocols, you are equipped to troubleshoot the many permutations that incorrectly configured POP/IMAP accounts can take, including a few of my favorites: The rogue POP device, dueling POPs, the 3-POP3 super network, and the “I just downloaded ten years of business emails to my smartphone and left in on the bus.”
P.S. Infernal Malted Ape Pasta would be a good name for a band. So would IMAP and the PO Protocols.