POP vs IMAP vs SMTP vs Forwarding emails

POP vs IMAP, the eternal fight. What is POP and what is IMAP, and what in the hell is SMTP, this one is new, not to mention email forwarding. Here is the answer to all that:

What is POP Protocol

Post office protocol (also called POP) downloads email directly to your computer. When this happens, the mail is deleted from the ISP server. This process occurs to prevent you from reading the same email messages again when you access the ISP server from another computer. The benefit of POP mail is since messages are downloaded directly to your computer, you can read them even if you aren’t connected to the Internet.

What is IMAP Protocol

IMAP is Internet message access protocol, a standard protocol to access your email from a local server. It receives and held your email by your mail server. It requires a small amount of data transfer, so could work even with slowest modem connections. Emails only downloaded when a specific email message will be read. You may create and manipulate folders or delete messages on the server. IMAP allows using encryption, when you are sending and receiving your mails, thus is more secure. Microsoft Outlook is the best client for IMAP protocol.

What is SMTP Protocol

The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the way of Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to deliver your email to the recipient’s mail server. The SMTP protocol cannot receive emails, it can only send them.According to your network settings, you may only be able to use the SMTP under certain conditions.

What is Email forwarding

Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending an email message delivered to one email address on to a possibly different email address. The term forwarding has no specific technical meaning.[1] Users and administrators of email systems use the same term when speaking of both server-based and client-based forwarding.

Email forwarding can also redirect mail going to one address and send it to one or several other addresses. Vice versa, email items going to several different addresses can converge via forwarding to end up in a single address in-box.

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