A common question we get is when setting up email accounts, is should I use POP3 or IMAP when setting up my email account.
What is the difference?
When POP3 connects to our server, it downloads all the emails from our server onto your local computer. After a set amount of time, it will then delete those emails from the server. This means, if you use your email from multiple computers, you might have some emails on one computer, but not the other, as they would have been deleted from the server when the first computer downloaded them.
IMAP keeps your emails on our server and only keeps a small cache of emails on your local computer. This means that if you use your email across multiple computers, each inbox should look the same, as they will be synchronizing themselves to stay up to date with the copy on the server.
Advantages & Disadvantages
Advantages of IMAP
- If your computer crashes/is stolen/etc., you will not lose your emails, as they are still on our server.
- You can access your email across multiple devices without synchronisation issues
- Emails are on the server all the time, so accessing them can be done from anywhere as long as you have a device with Internet access
Disadvantages of IMAP
- You need an active internet connection to be able to view your email. The recent emails should be cached, but for older emails, you may need to be on the internet to view the email and attachments.
- Your storage capacity may not be big enough. You may need extra storage depending on the type of emails you send and receive. We recommend that if your mailbox increases over 20GB, we recommend that you migrate your data to an Exchange 365 service.
- If your OST (Outlook) file gets too big, the file might corrupt on your machine. You may need to rebuild this file or search index issues might arise when you start searching for emails within Outlook.
Summary
Overall, IMAP is more suitable for people who access their email from multiple devices or locations and need to keep their email messages organized across all devices.
POP3 is more suitable for people who access their email from a single device or location and want to keep their email messages stored locally without worrying about exceeding the disk quota on the server.
It is important to be aware that you should have a backup policy in place to back up your PST file to another device every few weeks. In the event, you are using POP3 and something happens to your device, you may only retrieve a small amount of data.
