What is the difference between IMAP and POP3 protocol?
Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP3) are the two prevalent standard Internet protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all e-mail clients and mail servers support both protocols. IMAP generally provides more complete and complex remote access to typical mailbox operations. IMAP has the following typical characteristics: • Allows multiple clients/machines to manage the same mailbox. • Email is normally stored on the server. Clients may store local copies (on their machine) of the messages, but these are considered to be a temporary cache. • The state of messages (Read, Unread, Deleted, etc) is synchronized between the server and the client(s). • E-mail clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. POP generally supports single-machine/client simple download-and-delete requirements. While most POP clients have an option to leave mail on server after download, e-mail clients using POP usually connects,
