What is POP mail?
Note: At Indiana University, UITS has discontinued POP mail in favor of IMAP. For more information on the POP and IMAP protocols, see At IU, why doesn’t UITS support POP mail? POP (Post Office Protocol) mail refers to email software on your personal computer that sends and receives mail via a shared computer’s electronic post office. Personal computers seldom have the network resources required to serve as an independent post office, which is why most people use shared systems as email servers. POP mail software on your personal computer (the POP client) logs into the shared computer (the POP server) and transfers received mail from your account to your personal computer. When you send a message from your personal computer, the POP client transfers it to a dedicated mail system for transmission on the Internet. Most POP mail clients support features such as document attachment, automatic document encoding and decoding, user lookup, internal address books, font selection, signature file
Post Office Protocol (POP) is the original method used to access your e-mail. POP works by downloading all the messages in your Linux inbox to your PC or Mac. This method works well if you primarily access your e-mail from one computer. If, however, you are using more than one PC or Mac, messages will be downloaded to both machines. Consequently, keeping track of which messages are on which computer can be difficult. Another potential drawback to using POP is that if you selected the option of keeping a copy of your messages on the server as well as downloading them to your computer, then you must periodically log in to your Linux account to delete your messages. Otherwise, your disk quota may be exceeded. Still, POP offers an easy-to-use method for accessing e-mail for persons primarily using one computer.
