You’ve been using email forever, but do you know what all that email jargon means? Keep reading to find out more about the differences between the various ways you can receive email.

• Imap Pop3 Exchange
• Exchange 2016 Pop3
• Microsoft Exchange Pop3 Settings
• Exchange 2016 Imap Settings
• Microsoft Exchange Pop3 Settings Windows 10

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Find your IMAP or POP server settings If you're using a common email service, such as Outlook.com or Gmail, use this table to find your email provider's incoming (IMAP or POP) and outgoing (SMTP) server settings. If you want to use POP to access your email in Outlook.com, you'll first need to enable POP access. Select Settings View all Outlook settings Mail Sync email. Under POP and IMAP, select Yes under Let devices and apps use POP.

Whether you use company email, a web service like Gmail or Outlook.com, or your own email server, there’s more to receiving email than it might seem like on the surface. If you’ve set up an email client, you’ve no doubt come across the options like POP3, IMAP, and Exchange. We’re going to take a look at the difference between email clients and web mail, and at the different protocols used.

Email Clients vs Webmail

Before we explain the different protocols used to download emails, let’s take a few minutes to understand the simpler stuff—the difference between email clients and webmail. If you’ve ever started a Gmail, Outlook.com, or other online email account, you’ve used webmail. If you use an app like Microsoft Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or Mozilla Thunderbird to manage your emails, you’re using an email client.

Both webmail and email clients send and receive email, and they use similar methods for doing so. Webmail is an app that’s written to be operated over the internet through a browser—usually with no downloaded applications or additional software necessary. All of the work, so to speak, is done by remote computers (i.e. servers and machines you connect to through the Internet).

Email clients are apps you install on local devices (i.e. your personal or work PC, a tablet, or smartphone). The client apps interact with remote email servers to download and send email to whomever you might care to. Some of the back end work of sending email and all of the front end work of creating a user interface (what you look at to receive your email) is done on your device with the installed app, rather than by your browser with instructions from the remote server. However, many webmail providers also allow users to use email clients with their service—and here’s where it may start to get confusing. Let’s run through a quick example to explain the difference.

Say you sign up for a new email address with Google’s Gmail. You begin sending and receiving email through the webmail service by connecting to it in your browser. Google is providing two things for you. The first is a web front end where you can read, organize, and compose messages. The second is a mail server back end where all the message storage and routing goes on.

Now, say you decide you don’t like Google’s Gmail interface, so you decide to switch to an email client that supports Gmail—whether that’s the official Gmail interface or something like the built-in mail app on your device. Now, instead of using your web based client (Gmail’s web interface) to interact with Google’s Gmail servers, the app you’re using interacts with the mail servers directly, sidestepping webmail altogether.

Imap Pop3 Exchange

All the webmail providers offer the ability to use their website to conduct your business or to connect a client to their servers and do things that way.

If you’re using an email client, whether it’s to connect to a webmail provider’s server, your own mail server’s, or your company’s servers, that client will connect using one of various email protocols like POP3, IMAP, or Exchange. So, let’s take a closer look at those.

POP3

Post Office Protocol (POP) offers a way of interacting with mail servers that dates back to a very different Internet than we use today. Computers tended to not have permanent Internet access. Instead, you connected to the Internet, did what you needed to do, and then disconnected. Those connections were also pretty low bandwidth compared to what we have access to today. Microsoft teams excel sheet locked for editing.

Engineers created POP as a dead simple way to download copies of emails for offline reading. The first version of POP was created in 1984, with the POP2 revision created in early 1985. POP3 is the current version of this particular style of email protocol, and still remains one of the most popular email protocols. POP4 has been proposed, and may be developed one day, although there’s not been much progress in several years.

POP3 works something like this. Your app connects to an email server, downloads all messages to your PC that have not been previously downloaded, and then deletes the original emails from the server. Alternatively, you can configure your app and server to not delete emails for a specific amount of time, or even to not delete emails from the server at all—even if they’ve been downloaded by your client.

Assuming the emails do get deleted from the server, then the only copies of those messages are in your client. You can’t log on from another device or client and see those emails.

Even if you set your server up to not delete messages after they’re downloaded, things still get pretty complicated when you’re checking email from multiple devices. Here are a few examples:

• When you send an email, the sent email is stored in the client from which you sent it. You won’t be able to see your sent messages on other devices.
• When you delete an email in a client, it’s only deleted in that client. It’s not deleted from other clients that have downloaded the message.
• Each client downloads all messages from the server. You’ll end up with multiple copies of messages on different devices, with no good way of sorting out what you’ve read and when. At least, not without doing a lot of email forwarding or porting around mailbox files.

While those limitations are substantial, POP3 is still a fast, robust protocol that is particularly useful if you only check email from one device. For example, if you only ever check mail from your PC using Windows Live Mail, then there’s no reason not to use POP3.

IMAP

The Internet Messaging Access Protocol (IMAP) was created in 1986, but suits the modern day world of omnipresent, always-on Internet connectivity quite well. The idea behind IMAP was keep users from having to be tied to a single email client, giving them the ability to read their emails as if they were “in the cloud.”

Unlike POP3, IMAP stores all messages on the server. When you connect to an IMAP server, the client app lets you read those emails (and even downloads copies for reading offline), but all the real business happens on the server. When you delete a message in a client, that message is deleted on the server, so you don’t see it if you connect to the server from other devices. Send messages are also stored on the server, as is information about which messages have been read.

In the end, IMAP is a much better protocol to use if you’re connecting to your mail server from multiple devices. And in a world where people have become accustomed to checking mail from their PCs, phones, and tablets, that’s a vital distinction.

IMAP isn’t without its problems, though.

Because IMAP stores emails on a remote mail server, you typically have a limited mailbox size (though that depends on the settings provided by the email service). If you have huge numbers of emails you want to keep, you could run into problems sending and receiving mail when your box is full. Some users sidestep this problem by making local archived copies of emails using their email client, and then deleting them from the remote server.

Microsoft Exchange, MAPI, and Exchange ActiveSync

Microsoft began developing the Messaging API (MAPI) not long after IMAP and POP were first developed. And it’s actually designed for more than just email. Thoroughly comparing IMAP and POP to MAPI is pretty technical, and out of scope for this article.

But put simply, MAPI provides a way for email clients and other apps to communicate with Microsoft Exchange servers. MAPI is capable of IMAP-style syncing of emails, contacts, calendars, and other features, all of which is tied into local email clients or apps. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Outlook at work, you’ve used MAPI. In fact, all of the stuff Outlook does—emails, calendar syncing, looking up free/busy information, syncing contacts with the company, and so on—works over MAPI.

This syncing function is branded by Microsoft as “Exchange ActiveSync.” Depending on what device, phone, or client you use, this same technology might be called any of the three Microsoft protocols—Microsoft Exchange, MAPI, or Exchange ActiveSync—but offers a very similar server-based email syncing as that provided by IMAP.

Because Exchange and MAPI are Microsoft products, you’ll likely only run into this protocol if you’re using email provided by a company that uses Exchange mail servers. Many email clients, including the default Android and iPhone mail apps, are Exchange ActiveSync capable.

Other Email Protocols

Yes, there are other protocols for sending, receiving, and using email, but the vast majority of people use one of the three major protocols—POP3, IMAP, or Exchange. Since these three technologies likely cover the needs of nearly all our readers, we’re not going to go into detail about the other protocols. However, if you have any experience using email protocols not listed here, we’re interested to hear about it—feel free to discuss them in the comments.

In Short: Which Do I Use to Set Up My Email?

Depending on your personal style of communicating your email provider, you can pretty quickly narrow down how you should use your email.

• If you use check your email from a lot of devices, phones, or computers, use a webmail service or set up your email clients to use IMAP.
• If you use mostly webmail and want your phone or iPad to sync with your webmail, use IMAP, as well.
• If you’re using one email client on one dedicated machine (say, in your office), you might be fine with POP3, but we’d still recommend IMAP.
• If you have a huge history of email and you’re using an old mail provider without a lot of drive space, you may want to use POP3 to keep from running out of space on the remote email server.
• If you use company email, and your company uses an Exchange server, you’ll have to use Exchange.

For our geekier readers who already know this stuff, feel free to join in on the discussion! Let us know how you explain to relatives and tech-challenged coworkers the difference in common email setups. Better yet, keep this guide handy and save yourself the trouble of explaining it!

Exchange 2016 Pop3

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Summary: An overview of POP3 and IMAP4, and the differences between them.

By default, POP3 and IMAP4 are enabled for all users in Exchange Online.

• To enable or disable POP3 and IMAP4 for individual users, see Enable or Disable POP3 or IMAP4 access for a user.

• To customize the POP3 or IMAP4 settings for a user, see Set POP3 or IMAP4 settings for a user.

Note

To protect your Exchange Online tenant from brute force or password spray attacks, your organization will need to Disable Basic authentication in Exchange Online and only use Modern authentication in Exchange Online. Disabling Basic authentication will block legacy protocols, such as POP and IMAP.

Users can use any email programs that support POP3 and IMAP4 to connect to Exchange Online. These programs include Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Entourage, and many third-party programs, such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Eudora. The features supported by each email client programs vary. For information about features offered by specific POP3 and IMAP4 client programs, see the documentation that's included with each application.

POP3 and IMAP4 provide access to the basic email features of Exchange Online and allow for offline email access, but don't offer rich email, calendaring, and contact management, or other features that are available when users connect with Outlook, Exchange ActiveSync, Outlook on the web (formerly known as Outlook Web App), or Outlook Voice Access.

Note

Each time a person accesses a POP-based or IMAP-based email program to open his or her Office 365 email, that user will experience a delay of several seconds. The delay results from using a proxy server, which introduces an additional hop for authentication. The proxy server first looks up the assigned pod server (client access server) and then authenticates against that.

Settings users use to set up POP3 or IMAP4 access to their Exchange Online mailboxes

After you enable POP3 and IMAP4 client access, you have to give users the information in the following table so that they can connect their email programs to their Exchange Online mailboxes.

POP3 and IMAP4 email programs don't use POP3 and IMAP4 to send messages to the email server. Email programs that use POP3 and IMAP4 rely on SMTP to send messages.

Understanding the differences between POP3 and IMAP4

Microsoft Exchange Pop3 Settings

By default, when POP3 email programs download email messages to a client computer, the downloaded messages are removed from the server. When a copy of your user's email isn't kept on the email server, the user can't access the same email messages from multiple computers. However, some POP3 email programs can be configured to keep copies of the messages on the server so that the same email messages can be accessed from another computer. POP3 client programs can be used to download messages from the email server to only a single folder (usually, the Inbox) on the client computer. POP3 can't synchronize multiple folders on the email server with multiple folders on the client computer. POP3 also doesn't support public folder access.

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Email client programs that use IMAP4 are more flexible and generally offer more features than those that use POP3. By default, when IMAP4 email programs download email messages to a client computer, a copy of each downloaded message remains on the email server. Because a copy of the user's email message is kept on the email server, the user can access the same email message from multiple computers. With IMAP4 email, the user can access and create multiple email folders on the email server. Users can then access any of their messages on the server from computers in multiple locations. For example, most IMAP4 programs can be configured to keep a copy of a user's sent items on the server so that he or she can view the sent items from any other computer. IMAP4 supports additional features that are supported by most IMAP4 programs. For example, some IMAP4 programs include a feature that lets users view only the headers of their email messages on the server (who the messages are from and the subjects) and then download only the messages that they want to read.

Send and receive options for POP3 and IMAP4 email programs

POP3 and IMAP4 email programs let users choose when they want to connect to the server to send and receive email. This section discusses some of the most common connectivity options and provides some factors your users should consider when they choose connection options available in their POP3 and IMAP4 email programs.

Common configuration settings

Three of the most common connection settings that can be set on the POP3 or IMAP4 client application are:

• To send and receive messages every time the email application is started. When this option is used, mail is sent and received only on starting the email application.

• To send and receive messages manually. When this option is used, messages are sent and received only when the user clicks a send-and-receive option in the client user interface.

• To send and receive messages every set number of minutes. When this option is used, the client application connects to the server every set number of minutes to send messages and download any new messages.

For information about how to configure these settings for the email application that you use, see the Help documentation that's provided with the email application.

Considerations when selecting send and receive options

The default setting on some email programs is to not keep a copy of messages on the server after they're retrieved. If the user wants to access messages from multiple email programs or devices, they should keep a copy of messages on the server.

Exchange 2016 Imap Settings

If the device or computer that's running the POP3 or IMAP4 email application is always connected to the internet, the user might want to configure the email application to send and receive messages every set number of minutes. Connecting to the server at frequent intervals lets the user keep the email application up-to-date with the most current information on the server. However, if the device or computer that's running the POP3 or IMAP4 email application isn't always connected to the internet, the user might want to configure the email application to send and receive messages manually.

Note

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Microsoft Exchange Pop3 Settings Windows 10

If the user is using an IMAP4-compliant email application that supports the IMAP4 IDLE command, the user might be able to send email to and receive email from the Exchange mailbox in nearly real time. For this connection method to work, both the email server application and the client application must support the IMAP4 IDLE command. In most cases, users don't have to configure any settings in their IMAP4 programs to use this connection method.