What are POP3, IMAP, and SMTP? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
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this every week in your inbox. So the world is full of confusing acronyms and especially the world
of technology and computers. These POP, 3, SMTP, IMAP, these are really old acronyms,
and you've probably encountered them as you've been playing with email,
as you've been configuring email. But what do they mean? What are they and why do they matter? Well, let's take a look.
POP. POP stands for Post Office Protocol. POP3 simply means it's the third
version of the POP protocol. And in fact, POP 1 and POP 2
didn't last for very long. And to the best of my knowledge,
there's no rumblings even about a pop 4. So POP3 and POP are pretty synonymous. It is the language that an email program
running on your computer uses to communicate with your email server
to download your email. So for example, if you're running a program like,
say, Thunderbird, and you have it configured to use POP3,
then it is POP3, the language of POP3 that is used between Thunderbird and your
email server to literally download your email and remove it
from your online service. Your email then lives on your
PC in your copy of Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird as an example. POP3 has been around for so long, almost every desktop email program
and a bunch of mobile email programs can all handle connecting to email
services using POP3. Imap. Same, only different. Imap stands for the Internet
message access protocol. It's like POP3 in that it is a language
that is used between an email program running on your device to access your
email on your email services servers. The difference is that IMAP makes a fundamentally different assumption
about where the email lives. With POP3, you're downloading it so that your master copy
of your email is on your PC. It's just that one copy. Well, that makes it difficult to access your email from multiple different devices
because it's only on your PC. Imap makes the different decision. Imap assumes that the email server, the service you're using
holds the master copy of your email. And then using IMAP,
all you're really doing is you're given a window onto that master copy
from any number of different devices so that you can then read your email,
mark your email as read, delete your email,
do all of the things with your email, and have it appear on all of those other
devices because it's all happening on the master copy on your
email services server. It's really common these days. And in fact, it's generally what I recommend only because you generally will
have more than one device these days. If you've got a phone, if you've got multiple computers,
if you've got any number of different things that can access your email,
using IMAP so that they are all natively in sync with one
another is a great solution. Okay, what about SMTP? Simple mail transfer protocol. You know it as the way that an email
program on your desktop or on your device actually sends the mail you're sending
to your email service. So when you configure your email account
settings, one of them is the SMTP server. POP3 and IMAP, they're
used for receiving email. Smtp is what you're using to send email. Here's the unknown or not very well known secret of SMTP is that it's
the workhorse of email. It really is, because not only is it used
to send email from your PC to your email server,
it's the protocol that's used to send that email from server to server,
from server to server to server to server, however many hops it might take to finally
get the email to its destination. So SMTP is happening all the time
across all of the email services. It's sending email. Simple mail transfer protocol
doing a lot of transferring. Now, I do want to point out that web mail
works differently, mostly. I say that because when you access email using a web mail interface like
Gmail's web mail interface or Outlook. Com or so forth, you don't know
what's going on behind the scenes. You are accessing the master copy of your email on their services,
but it's up to them how they access it, what's appropriate,
how they got it implemented. They could be using IMAP, absolutely. Generally, they don't, but they could. But the bottom line is it's different. The one place where they overlap is
that some email services will allow you to fetch email from another
account into your account using POP3. In a sense, that makes your online account
for, say, Gmail, like a desktop email program in the sense
that it's now reaching out to some other account somewhere else
and downloading email. But that's really
the limit of the overlap. I hope this helps you understand a little
bit of how email is processed and what these acronyms actually mean when you are
faced with having to at least fill in the form than when you're
configuring an email program. For updates, for comments, for links related to this topic,
and more, visit Askleo.com/2143. I'm Leo Notenboom. This is
Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.
