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Differences Between POP and IMAP


Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

In previous years using IMAP was an expensive option due to the cost of storage and many opted for POP3 but with recent advances in cloud hosting resulting in an increase in storage and lower costs our current offering of mail storage now extend to 10GB of space for your mail accounts for both POP and IMAP giving you much more flexibility and headroom for your mail.

For more information on our cloud based mail service, please click here

POP vs IMAP Comparison Chart

After we were putting the chart together, we realised that the comparison is definitely more biased towards IMAP simply because IMAP offers more flexibility especially if you are in a business environment and have multiple devices.

POP3 FEATURES
IMAP FEATURES
Email is downloaded and displayed on your PC and if you move to another PC you have to either move your mail from PC to PC or redownload your email all over again
Email is stored on the mail server so you can use multiple PC’s and devices and all of them are synchronised with each other

If using Outlook all your mail is stored in a single .PST file. If the pst file get corrupted, you lose everything depending on your settings.
Email is stored on the server, so if your local PST is corrupted you create a new account on your PC and resync.
Depending on your PC settings, if you opt to “keep a copy of your messages on the server” some email clients like Outlook can get confused and download everything all over again.
Email is synchronised so there is no “confusion” or multiple downloads.
If you download your mail to your PC/laptop and your PC/laptop gets corrupted, stolen, damaged, you lose all your email.If you use the “keep a copy of your messages on the server” setting though you would have to redownload all your messages again.Even if you keep a copy of messages on the server, ONLY the inbox is redownloaded, all other mail such as sent items and drafts are lost.
Email is stored on the server so in case of loss of your PC/laptop then you simply get a new PC/laptop and synchronise which would simply take a few minutes.You will then be able to recover all email as if nothing ever happended.
If you login to your webmail and send an email you will not see this sent email on your PC
Email is synchronised so if you send an email from your webmail it will appear on your desktop PC when you get back to the office
When you create a folder in your desktop PC this is not created on the server.
When you create a new folder on your desktop PC, the same folder is created on the server.
All messages as well as their attachments will        be downloaded into desktop PC during the ‘check new email’ process.
A whole message will be downloaded only when it        is opened for display from its content.
Messages may be reloaded onto desktop PC        several times due to the corruption of system files.
The occurrence of reloading messages from the        server to PC is much less when compared to POP3.
Messages are deleted on the desktop PC.        Comparatively, it is inconvenient to clean up your mailbox on the server.
Messages can be deleted directly on the server        to make it more convenient to clean up your mailbox on the server.
Outgoing email is stored only locally on the        desktop PC.
Outgoing mail is stored on both server and PC
Messages may be reloaded onto desktop PC        several times due to the corruption of system files.
The occurrence of reloading messages from the        server to PC is much less when compared to POP3.