POP or IMAP, What’s the Difference?

The vast majority of website hosting providers offer email with their hosting packages.  Most of those offer users a choice on how to interact with the mail server, POP or IMAP.  Which should you choose and what’s the difference anyway?

POP3 versus IMAP

POP3 is useful in checking emails from a computer that is in a specific location.

If you intend on accessing your email from several different locations or devices, IMAP is the better option.

IMAP uses what’s called “Push” technology to “Push” changes/updates to all devices.

For example, if you check your email on your phone and read the first and third email (marking them as ‘read’), when you get home to your desktop and check the same email, it’ll show the first and third emails as ‘read’.

If it was a POP3 email account, all would still show as unread, because you haven’t read them on THAT device.

There are a few cases where POP is better, but for the most part, IMAP is the way to go.

Check out this article on Geek.com for more details about POP vs IMAP for email.

Choose wisely, but switching is easy

The POP vs. IMAP debate is all about how you interact with your email. If you’re constantly in your email with attachments and use it like file storage system, POP will guarantee that you always have access to your information. If you’re 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, especially if you have POP configured to store your email on the server instead of deleting it, 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 and allows you to switch between them as you see fit. You can choose the service the best fits your needs, but ideally your email should exist as a service that requires very little maintenance and configuration once it has been setup and used.