The Difference Between POP and IMAP
Posted by Max Baun on Wed, Aug 27, 2008 @ 08:45 AM
When some people hear POP or IMAP mail server, they get confused. Basically these are two different methods for delivering email. Let's use a post office mailbox as our example to explain the major difference. In a POP post office box, you pick up your mail and bring it home. You don't spend long at your PO Box, but once you take it from there, you can't access it at any other post
office. When you get home, you respond to the letters you receive, bring them back to the post office, and they are sent.
With an IMAP post office box, you can get mail from any post office you go to, but your time spent in the post office takes longer. Say you are a resident of Waltham, but you are in Boston and want to get your mail. You can go to a post office in Boston, check your mail, get rid of the ones you don't want and leave. Now say you drive down to Quincy and realized you forgot to respond to a message you checked in Boston. You can go to the Quincy post office, open your mailbox, find the same exact message, and send back your response.
The following is a chart further explores the difference between POP and IMAP mail servers.
Pros Cons
|
-
Doesn’t take up a lot of server space
When you download a message with your email
client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) the message is removed from the server
-
Quick connect time
Your client connects with the POP mail server
only when it needs to send or receive messages
|
-
Only one computer can download your
messages off the server
Once your client downloads the messages, you
can’t download it on any other computer
-
Email attachments do not open quickly
-
Users usually don’t keep backup of
their email
If they delete messages, they can’t access
them from other computers
|
|
-
Get your email in any location
Using a mail client with an IMAP server allows
you to download messages from any location
-
The changes you make in your mail
client affect what happens on the server
Ex: Adding folders in your email client adds
folders to your mail server
-
Can handle very large emails
|
- Slow due to long connection times
Since your mail client is in constant
connection with the server, it tends to slow things down
-
Mailbox spaces on servers will reach
limit
If you never delete messages, the mailbox
space on your server will fill up
|
POP
IMAP