IMAP Vs POP3 Protocols

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Internet Messaging Access protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP3) are protocols used to access emails over Internet. Performing same task but they do have differences in their working strategies. Let’s check the difference between two protocols that you need to know very well before buying Email Hosting.

IMAP

• With IMAP protocol, you do not have the need to download emails on your machine every time you check your emails.


• The best part of IMAP is that you can access your emails from various devices and locations. We can access our emails and manipulate our contents of mailbox in real time on the server.


• IMAP has certain restrictions regarding the mailbox size along with some limitations on number of messages we can keep. But you can take a back up of old emails and store them on your local machine.


• In IMAP, outgoing emails are filtered on server. The reason it’s filtered so that it can be accessible from various machines.


• Using IMAP protocol, we can delete our messages on server directly. Thus it helps to clean our mailbox on server.


• As compared to POP3, IMAP consists of proper Web interface.

POP3

• POP3 downloads email every time you check your emails.


• With POP3, you can access your emails using single computer which might be in office or at home.


• POP3 do not have any restrictions on size of mailboxes or number of messages in particular mailbox.  The only limit is the size of the computer.


• POP3 stores email its outgoing emails on local machine and these emails are not filtered.


• With POP3, message can be deleted from the local machine only. Thus it’s really difficult and inconvenient to clean up the mailbox on the server.


• POP3 doesn’t have Web interface.