Jan van der Pluijm

Due to the changes planned for the coming months, you may have to change some settings in the e-mail program you use. To explain it as clearly as possible, it is therefore useful to first provide some background information.

For email, HCC provides access through both IMAP and POP3. You may not be fully familiar with these terms, so you may find it difficult to decide whether to use IMAP or POP3. In that case, this article offers a solution.

What is IMAP
IMAP stands for ‘Internet Message Access Protocol’ and is a protocol that retrieves your e-mails. The biggest advantage of IMAP is that your emails remain on the mail server, allowing you to read your email messages from different locations. It does not matter whether you use an e-mail program or webmail; your emails are automatically synced. The ‘read’ status is therefore also constantly updated. An additional advantage of IMAP is that email addresses can be managed by several people. You can also easily create folders and subfolders on the server and e-mail actions such as ‘search’ and ‘sort’ can also be performed with slow computers.

When configuring an email address, you have the option to choose IMAP or POP. When you choose IMAP, you will be asked for the server name and IMAP port.

What is POP
POP is the abbreviation for ‘Post Office Protocol’ and, like IMAP, is a standard with which e-mail messages can be retrieved. When we talk about POP, we are actually talking about POP3, the third and most recent variant of the protocol. POP3 does not store e-mail messages on the server, but retrieves them from it. So emails are stored locally and then deleted from the server. Anyone who uses POP3 can still view and edit e-mails without a constant internet connection. Internet is only required to receive and send the e-mails. Because the emails are stored locally, they cannot be synchronized. With POP it is therefore not possible to read your mail on different devices. You do have more storage capacity and the server is less loaded.

Pros and cons
So, the main difference between POP and IMAP is that POP pulls emails from the server and stores them locally, while IMAP keeps your emails on the server. Although IMAP is now seen as the standard, both protocols have their advantages and disadvantages. Whether you can make better use of POP or IMAP therefore mainly depends on your needs.

With IMAP you can read emails on multiple devices and you always have a backup of your emails on the server. However, because your e-mails remain on the server, your mailbox can also fill up faster. Also, you cannot open and edit your emails when you are not connected to the internet. This is an important difference between IMAP and POP3. You can do this with POP3, because your emails are stored on your computer. You therefore only need an internet connection to receive or send e-mails. However, POP3 has the disadvantage that e-mails cannot be synchronized and therefore cannot be opened via webmail, for example.

Configuration
In modern e-mail programs, when configuring a new account, an attempt will automatically be made to create an IMAP account. Usually all it takes is email address, username and password. The rest of the settings are filled in automatically.

Tidy
But if we look a little further under the ‘hood’: with both POP and IMAP you can now specify that e-mails with a certain age must be removed from the server. This means that those old emails will disappear. But setting this up is definitely recommended for e-mail accounts with limited space.

Archive
Because with IMAP synchronization, a deleted email on one device means that it will be deleted on all devices, it is useful to create an archive file in your email program. In that folder you can put all the e-mails that you want or need to keep. As a result, those emails can of course only be read on the device on which you created the archive. If you don’t want this, the only alternative is to keep a close eye on your used space and manually delete messages to continue receiving emails.