Tip of the day … IMAP Email

When setting up an email inbox on your desktop mail program, most applications, for example Microsoft Outlook will try and push you towards setting up a POP connection.

POP email connections are widely supported by most decent email hosts. However is POP actually the best email inbox type to use?

No necessarily. When you have a POP email inbox with Microsoft outlook or thunderbird etc, they will typically want to download the messages off the email server onto your computers hard disk. The advantage of this method is that after a few years your email inbox may be very large, so keeping thousands of emails on your web host’s or IPS’s server could be a bit pricy due to the amount of disk space it takes up. However with the prices of hard drives dropping almost by the month, this means web hosts are now able to offer larger amounts of data storage at lower prices, so you can start leaving your emails on the mail server and not on your desktop.

But, why would you want to do this? Simple, when you are away from home and cant access your desktop computer, you dont have access to your email inbox. Because all emails are not typically stored on the server with a POP connection, instead they are on your local computer.

This is where IMAP comes in. At AGL Host, we recommend that all our clients switch from POP to a IMAP connection. With IMAP you emails are kept on the email server, so you have access to emails in your inbox wherever you are, either via your desktop email application, webmail or on your mobile. Also, when you receive an email with IMAP instead of sitting on the mail server for ages, it is automatically pushed to your email application. With POP, the mail program typically queries the mail server for new emails every 5 minutes, so you are not receiving your emails straights away.

IMAP sits and the centre of your email process and pushes your mail out to multiple devices instantly. Here is a illustration of this:

Receiving your emails straight away is one of the features Apple are promoting with their mobile me service, they call it ‘Push Email’. However “Push Email” is simply a IMAP email connection re-branded.

When you get the chance, check which connection method your email program is using to check your email. If it is POP, go into your settings and chance it to a IMAP connection. All our servers support both POP and IMAP.

  Category: web hosting