Home computer use: IMAP, POP3, and SMTP

Self-tutoring about computer terms: the tutor mentions three he’s wondered about.

One place I’m perhaps not so strong as I should be is awareness of the mechanisms behind everyday computer usage. Today, researching email, I ran across a few terms I’ve seen for 25+ years but never really knew enough about. Today I still don’t, but I know more than before. Here are my impressions of IMAP, POP, POP3, and SMTP:

IMAP: Internet Message Access Protocol: From my understanding, this is the situation when you can log into your email from various devices, or from the same one repeatedly, to read and re-read the same emails.

POP: Post Office Protocol: Unlike IMAP, POP is the situation where reading an email from the server is like removing it from the mailbox: you need to store it somewhere else, or it’s gone. It may automatically download to your device, for instance. With POP, the email doesn’t remain on the server once it’s been received.

POP3: the latest version of POP.

SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: this is the way of sending email. You just send the email, but under the hood, this is the protocol used.

All of these definitions are my understanding.

Source:

socketlabs.com