What does POP mean?
MEANING 1: As in: Do you have a POP on the east coast? Or: I live in Santa Clara. Do you have a POP near me? Or: What is your nearest POP to San Diego? In these cases POP stands for Point of Presence and refers to the nearest phone number that somebody can dial to access the Internet. This assumes that we are a dialup Internet access provider, which we are not. The only way to access our servers is over the Internet, but we do not offer dialup accounts. MEANING 2: As in: Do you have a POP/SMTP mail server? Or: Can I get my email with a POP email client like Eudora? In these cases POP stands for Post Office Protocol and refers to the protocol used to get email from the server by email clients like Eudora. By the way SMTP (which stands for Simple Mail Transport Protocol) is how email clients like Eudora send mail.
The current champ in Internet email mailbox access standards, but its limitations–basically, you connect to a server and download all your messages, which are then deleted from the server–discourage flexibility. Of course, some clients let you leave all messages on the server, and/or refuse to download messages above a certain size. Still, as messages become longer–with multimedia (such as sound or video) objects and the likes–we’ll want some flexibility in what we retrieve and when we retrieve it. That’s where IMAP comes in. The current version of POP is POP3.
POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It is a standard means by which mail programs access E-Mail stored on a mail server. It is very lightweight and fast, but has few advanced features. As it downloads messages to your mail program, the messages are removed from the server. The current implementation of POP is version 3, also referred to as POP3.
