by Keith Richardson
How do you “do email” on your PC or Mac? Most people use an ‘email client’—a program installed on their computers to interact with remote servers to receive and send email. PC users will be familiar with Outlook. On Macs, most of us use Apple Mail (or possibly Thunderbird or even Entourage or Outlook.) In addition, we probably use the email servers of our Internet Service Provider (Shaw or TELUS) to handle email deliveries. Shawmail (@shaw.ca) is handled by a system called Post Office Protocol (POP3). TELUSmail (@TELUS.net), is handled by IMAP—Internet Message Access Protocol. Important to many of us, an email client allows us to manage several email accounts in one location and even access both POP3 and IMAP in the same place.
But what if we use our web browser to access email as WEBMAIL—for example Gmail, Yahoo mail or Hotmail? (Or, in some cases, even Shaw or TELUS webmail?) Webmail can be accessed by all web browsers. However, webmail interfaces may not be as well designed as our email clients’. Webmail is a more generic, awkward experience I’d rather avoid if I can. Doing email in Apple’s Mail client is actually fun!
The main differences between POP3 and IMAP? Unfortunately, the explanation may be complicated because POP3 allows some alternatives in what happens to email after it’s delivered to our client that can make it resemble IMAP.
In the main, however, IMAP mail continues to reside on the host server computer even after it delivers a COPY to our client. POP3 mail, however, eventually deletes the original from the host after delivering it to our computer, where we store it ourselves. How long it stays on the external sever is usually up to us—a setting we control. We can have it deleted, for example, from Shaw’s server immediately upon delivery, or set it to stay on the server for a period of several days or weeks. If we delete POP3 mail on one device, it MAY still be available on another device, depending on settings in our email client.
Email on an IMAP host server, on the other hand, resides there for ages—that’s no problem for us because the company providing this free medium has servers with enormous capacity. No matter what we do with the “copies” on own computers, we can still access the “originals” through webmail. So it might seem to be an advantage to subscribe to an email service that provides IMAP because POP3 requires more management. After receiving an email from a POP3 server, we’re expected to open it, then either delete it or save it in another mailbox in the Client program on our own computer. Eventually, the company server will no longer be able to help us retrieve an old email that we have received and deleted. Copies of SENT emails will reside in our own Client Sent boxes, however, until we delete them from our client. POP3 users have a say in how long our ISP’s store our incoming and deleted mail. But POP3 hosts are more likely to have a small limit on how much they’ll allow us keep on their host servers.
What about browser-accessed webmail handled by Internet companies like Google (gmail.com), Yahoo (yahoo.ca) or Microsoft (including hotmail.com) or Apple (icloud.com or me.com)? All of these use IMAP servers (although you CAN elect to receive Gmail as POP mail if you prefer). And all of these IMAP services can be set up in our email client if we wish. If we subscribe to any of these services on our iPad or iPhone, we’ll be using IMAP which is preferred by mobile devices. (Yes, you CAN set up POP mail for Gmail on a mobile device, but the preference is for IMAP.) And if you do set up IMAP mail in your email client you can store both received and sent emails on your computer if you wish.
IF you do ALL your email through a BROWSER (i.e. as webmail), however, your email, contacts, and stored mail are entirely in the hands of your host. If you can’t access the Internet, you can’t see your stuff. In addition, you lose many of the benefits of well-designed email client interfaces.
For more details, we recommend you consult http://www.howtogeek.com/99423/email-whats-the-difference-in-pop3-imap-and-exchange.
“What difference does it really make whether I use POP3 or IMAP in my email client?” you ask. If you use only one device (computer or tablet) to receive and send email, the answer is, “Not much.” If you also handle email on a tablet and/or smart phone (which also have client software), we recommend you use an IMAP service that reflects the “ecosystem” you’ve chosen to roll with. If you browse with Google Chrome, own an Android smartphone, and use Gmail on your computer, stick with Google products. If you’re “with TELUS” on your PC, you may want to get your smart phone from them, too.
On the other hand, if you use a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone, take advantage of Apple’s iCloud. Don’t mix Google and iCloud. The main benefit will be that if you delete an email (or contact or calendar entry on your iPhone or iPad) you won’t have to deal with it again on your Mac or other Apple device. However, because the email on your device is just a copy of what’s on the IMAP host server, you can still retrieve the archived original if you need to unless you take the extraordinary measure of deleting it from the host.
Finally, if you’re “with Shaw” and choose, within the same email client, to have a mixture of POP and IMAP accounts (say an @shaw.ca POP3 account and an IMAP @yahoo.ca account or @gmail.com), you will find managing the IMAP account is a little more complex and confusing because it appears to be duplicated! And on that somewhat confusing note, we’ll end by saying, if you need help with your Mac’s Mail client, give MacSeniors a call. We can definitely help.