Difference between imap and pop3 protocols. Difference between IMAP and POP3 protocol. Adding webmail accounts to email applications such as Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird

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Understand, how to set up mail on android, not difficult at all. By following the step-by-step instructions outlined in this article, you can do this completely independently, no less than installing it.

Setting up an electronic mailbox on a device running Android occurs through mail program, which can be found in the list of already installed on Android programs. It is indicated by a postal envelope icon. Setting up your email inbox starts with finding this icon. Next, you need to follow the step-by-step instructions below, as with.

Step-by-step instruction how to set up mail on android

Step #1. Launching the mail program.
Launch your email program by clicking on the email icon.

Step #2. Setting up a username and password.
In the “E-mail” line, write down the full desired address of your future Email in this form: “[email protected]”).
In the “Password” line, enter a combination of characters that will serve as the login password to the mailbox you created. It is desirable that, in addition to Latin letters (uppercase and lowercase), it contains numbers and other characters that can be “represented” using the keyboard.

Step #3. Setting up your incoming mail server.
In the "Select account type" window you will be presented with three options:
- IMAP;
- POP3;
- Exchange.
Let's consider one of them. Let's say you chose the "POP3" protocol. You will need to follow the following directions:
- in the completed “Username” field, nothing needs to be changed;
- the entry hidden by the “******” symbols in the “Password” field will also not need to be changed;
- in the “POP3 Server” field you will need to enter “pop.mail.ru”;
- in the “Port” field, from the proposed options, it is best to select a protected one – “995”;
- in the “Security Type” field, select an entry with six Latin letters and a slash between them: SSL/TLS;
- in the “Delete messages from the server” field, it is advisable to select “never” - this means that the messages you receive will be saved on the mail.ru server;
- click “Next”.

Step #4. Setting up the outgoing message server for your mail.
- the “SMTP” field must be filled with the entry “smtp.mail.ru”;
- field “Port” - numbers 465;
- in the “Security Type” field, select six Latin letters with a slash between them: SSL/TLS;
- in the “Username” and “Password” fields leave everything as it is, you don’t need to change anything;
- click “Next”.

If you correctly understood how to set up mail on Android and followed the instructions, then your device should be ready to receive and send email messages.

There are two main methods of working with mail: Online and Offline.

According to the offline method, mail is delivered to the server, and the PC user periodically launches mail client, which pumps out all new mail on PC. All mail processing, such as filtering, occurs on the local machine. Offline access? a “store and forward” service designed to forward mail on demand from a mail server to a single endpoint machine. Once delivered to the destination machine, the messages are deleted from the mail server.

In the case of online access, mail is also delivered to the shared server, but the client no longer copies all mail and then deletes it from the server. The online approach is more client-server. In this case, the client can ask the server for the header of the message or request that the message be searched by some criterion. Messages can be marked with various status flags (for example, the message has been marked for deletion or a reply has been sent to it) and these marks are retained until they are explicitly deleted by the user (which may not happen until the next session).

  • Advantages of the offline method:
    • Minimum connection time to the server.
    • Minimal use of server resources.
  • Advantages of the online method:
    • Ability to use different computers at different times.
    • Ability to use?lightweight? client machines.
    • Platform-independent access to multiple mailboxes.
    • Possibility of simultaneous access to shared mailboxes.

The main advantage of online access is that mailboxes with incoming and archive mail are stored on the server and can be accessed uniformly from different computers at different times. And all this can be done without using protocols public access to files (these protocols do not exist on every platform, they can be inferior in performance and cause file locking problems. All this is not necessary for those users who always use the same computer to access mail, but it becomes very important for those who use multiple computers.

Opportunities and

POP was designed to support offline mail processing. Although the limitations of offline access can be compensated for by using this protocol online, POP simply does not have some of the functionality required for high-quality online access. The pseudo-online access mode supported by POP3 is where the user leaves mail on the server and this often requires a remote file system protocol in order for the mail client to update the mailbox or set message flags. IMAP can also be used for offline access, but its power manifests itself primarily with online access. In a nutshell, IMAP allows you to manipulate remote mailboxes as if they were local. Depending on the IMAP client implementation and the mail architecture that the mail system manager wishes to have, the user may store messages only on the client machine, only on the server, or have the choice to do both.

Let us now present quick comparison POP3 and IMAP4 protocols.

  • Characteristics common to both protocols
    • Both support offline access
    • Mail is delivered to a shared, always-on mail server
    • New mail is available from more client platforms and from anywhere on the network
    • The protocols are open and standardized (there are corresponding RFCs on the Internet)
    • Focused only on reading mail, both use
    • Both protocols support persistent message IDs (POP3 - not all servers) which are used for disconnected access
  • Benefits of POP3
    • Easier to implement
    • More clients exist at the moment
  • Benefits of IMAP4
    • Can manipulate persistent message flags (Seen, Draft, Deleted,?).
    • It can both store messages and download them. It is possible to add messages to your mailbox.
    • Can work with multiple mailboxes (possibly even hierarchical ones).
    • Can support parallel access to mailboxes and parallel updating of mailboxes.
    • Suitable for accessing non-mail data, such as news or documents.
    • Can use offline access to reduce connection time and used disk space.
    • Allows you to search for messages on the server.
    • It is possible to download part of a letter, and you can download a fragment starting from any place and of any length.
    • Designed specifically to improve online access performance, especially for slow connections.
    • IMAP4 rev 1 supports the Unicode standard (mailboxes with Unicode names, message search)
    • There is a standardized way to extend the basic protocol. In particular, there are extensions for managing user quotas and their access rights to other people's or shared mailboxes.
    • Are there ?companion protocols? (IMSP and its ACAP receiver) to store and manipulate user settings.

More about IMAP4

IMAP can manipulate persistent message status flags, including ?Seen?, ?Deleted?, ?Answered?, as well as user-defined flags. IMAP allows you to store messages and also receive them from the server. A user can add a message from an inbox to an archive box (or vice versa). Using IMAP, a client can access and manage multiple mailboxes. This includes both the ability to name and access various archive and inboxes, as well as the ability to list, create, delete, and rename them. These mailboxes can be located on the same or on different mail servers. An IMAP client can allow you to see them all at once and move messages from one mailbox to another.

IMAP can allow simultaneous access and updating of shared mailboxes. This ability is convenient if several clients process messages arriving in a common inbox. All active clients are notified of mailbox state changes via IMAP.

IMAP can be used to access non-mail data, such as Newsgroups. This is convenient from the point of view of unifying the method of access to various classes of information. IMAP also supports offline access, which saves connection time to the server and server resources. The offline method is convenient to use in situations where access to the server occurs only over an expensive dial-up connection and multi-platform access to any mailbox is not required. It is also beneficial to use such access if the client machine is rich in resources and the server is poor.

Not all IMAP clients offer support for offline mode, but the protocol fully allows it. IMAP has a companion protocol for managing user settings called IMSP, Internet Message Support Protocol. IMSP enables location-independent (multi-platform) access to the user's personal settings, e.g. address book. (Its descendant ACAP also allows you to store settings for servers and user groups. ACAP is specially optimized to reduce the amount of data sent over the network, has rich search capabilities on the server side, and allows you to manage data access rights.)

IMAP has designs to optimize online access, especially over low-speed links. These designs include the ability to obtain the structure of a message without downloading the entire message to the client machine, selective downloading of parts of a message, and the ability to use the server for lookup to reduce the amount of data transferred between the client and server. It can be very useful to delay sending some messages or parts of them (from the server to the client machine) until the appropriate moment, if the messages are not of immediate interest. If the message contains attached documents or multimedia data, transmitting only part of the message can be a big advantage. This can be felt quite clearly, for example, if you are in a hotel and they send you a short message with a 10 MB video clip attached.

Efficient handling of MIME messages is a significant advantage of IMAP over POP. (MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, a standard for encoding messages containing arbitrary file attachments. Once MIME messages are encoded, they can be sent using SMTP.) To summarize, we can say that

IMAP beats POP in three areas:

  • richer functionality for mailbox manipulation;
  • the ability to manage several mailboxes rather than just one;
  • primitives for optimizing online access performance, especially when it comes to large MIME messages.

Advantages of POP over IMAP:

  • the presence of a larger number of implementations, both clients and servers;
  • ease of setup (since POP has little functionality, you don’t need to configure anything).

In my opinion, over time, IMAP should supplant POP. A description of POP3 can be found in RFC-1939. IMAP4 is described in RFC-2060.

IMAP list software can be found at /go?www.imap.org/products.html, and a list of IMAP-related documents can be found at /go?www.imap.org/biblio.html.

Also of potential interest may be /go?www.imap.org/imap.docs.html (a collection of IMAP documents); Message Access Paradigms and Protocols (this document is a more complete description of the ideas presented in the article, in addition, it describes in detail the terminology and provides information about the POP and IMAP protocols in the context of online access).

Currently, there are a lot of methods of communication via the Internet. You can use ICQ or Skype, social media, other resources. About two decades ago, the only way to send or receive virtual mail was through email.

Until a certain time, servers processing user letters had limited capabilities. Storing large amounts of information was expensive, which meant deleting the message from the disk as soon as it was downloaded to the client's computer. Progress has moved forward, there are more opportunities, the user can store letters in a mailbox on a central server for an unlimited amount of time, and carry out various operations with them.

Data transfer protocols used when working with email

Any form of communication has a certain style – a set of agreements. On the network it is a protocol. When working with E-mail, a number of protocols can be used. Among them:

  • POP3;
  • IMAP.

What is the difference, which protocol and in which case is it advisable to use it?

What is POP3

Wanting to send a letter or trust a personal mailbox located on remote server, the user can use the browser installed on the computer, which is not entirely convenient. More often used, which exchanges information with the server using a specific protocol. If it is Post Office Protocol, the process is as follows:

  1. Compound;
  2. Receiving information by the client about the status of the mailbox, downloading letters;
  3. Updating the server and deleting selected messages;
  4. Closing the connection.

What is IMAP

The IMAP protocol provides the user with more options. After authorization on the mail resource, only the headers of the letters are downloaded to the computer. When you select the desired message, the client program downloads the entire letter. At the same time, you can work on-line and off-line. Read messages are not deleted; you can perform desired operations with them in the future.

Pros and cons of IMAP and POP3

Which protocol to choose? It all depends on the specifics of the job and needs.

In addition to the fact that messages are saved on the server without being deleted, the advantages of IMAP include:

  • Possibility of access to the mailbox from several clients;
  • Supports simultaneous access of multiple clients;
  • Supports multiple boxes;
  • Ability to create new folders that can be accessed by other users;
  • Ability to mark emails as read, important, and others;
  • Server search support;
  • Possibility of working in on-line mode.

The only downside in this case is that the user spends more time downloading letters from the central computer.

I am glad to meet you again, my dear readers. I am sure that many of you use the Internet not only to search for entertaining content and interesting information, but also to communicate via email.

During the process of setting it up, the question arises which protocol you want to use: POP3 or IMAP. This is a really important parameter and I suggest understanding the features of each of them.

What is a postal protocol?

These are the rules, or order, by which interactions occur between objects, programs, and networks involved in the mail forwarding process. In our case, the participants this process are:

  • Post service. This is a company that provides its own server for storing correspondence, specialized software (including a website), as well as email addresses to its clients. We are most interested in the mail server itself and the access settings for it. It should also be understood that an electronic mailbox implies the presence of an account and a space allocated for it (for storing messages) on the server;
  • Mail client is a program for creating and processing mail. There are unique applications for the mailboxes of one company. They can be successfully replaced by the corresponding mail web page, which allows you to operate mail directly on the server. There are also universal clients for working with accounts created on different services. For example, or thunderbird.

  • Devices from which mail is accessed. It could be a PC, tablet, smartphone, or even push-button telephone with internet access.

How does the mail delivery service work?

Now we will look at the mechanism of e-mail, which will bring us closer to understanding the features of POP3 or IMAP. The user on his PC using an email client creates a letter that he sends to a certain email address. But it does not go directly to the recipient (even if he is at the next desktop) but only through the mail server. At the same time, it is convenient to track the correspondence path through conditional folders:

  • From “Outbox” on the sender’s PC to “Outbox” on the server in the sender’s account;
  • Further movement is carried out only on the server - from the “Outbox” of the sender to the “Inbox” of the recipient’s account;
  • After the recipient's device connects to the network with the mail client, it begins exchanging data with the mail server. And now from the “Inbox” on the server, the letter goes to the same “Inbox” folder on the recipient’s PC.

So, my friends. When organizing email delivery along this route, there are two fundamentally different approaches.

  1. In one case, the main place for storing correspondence is the devices (mail clients) of the participants in the correspondence. And this order is called the POP3 protocol or Post Office Protocol version 3. It uses port 110.
  2. Another option is for all mail (including files attached to it) to be placed on mail server, and occupies physical space on it allocated for the user account. This order is designated as IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). How did you guess this technology, in fact, is an analogue cloud storage. Involved here TCP protocol and port 143.

To be fair, it's worth noting. POP3, with certain settings, allows the use of server space, but only for storing incoming messages. There is no such option for outgoing correspondence. After all, it is assumed that its sources are already on your device.

Now that we know how POP3 or IMAP works, I propose to consider their pros and cons in practical application. This will give us the answer to the question of what is best to use for your mailbox.

Home delivery of letters

  • All your correspondence is on your computer. Important documents and attachments are available to you regardless of your Internet connection. We will assume that in some cases this is exactly what the user requires;
  • It is not difficult to guess that in this case the intensity of requests to the server is low. Moreover, the protocol itself was developed to minimize the load on the network - the connection occurs for a short time, only to move server letters to the “client” or send them. And here we see an advantage that is relevant for conditions of low-speed or limited Internet traffic - the data transmission channel is not overloaded and effectively performs its functions;
  • Organizers of the mail service also benefit from using POP. It becomes possible to minimize the amount of used disk space on servers. And accordingly reduce their number and maintenance costs.

The disadvantage of this protocol is obvious. Full work with mail is possible only from one device. For an office this is somehow acceptable, but in other cases you need constant access from different devices and expanded capabilities when working with the server.

Our server is at your disposal, do what you want with your mail

Therefore, the IMAP protocol was developed as a more functional alternative. Let's evaluate its merits:

  • I have already spoken about the fact that mail is in the cloud and is always available if there is an Internet connection. When your smartphone has at least 3G, and Wi-Fi at home or in a cafe, working with letters turns into a pleasure. Everything is always at hand. At the same time, just like on POP3, you can download correspondence from the server and save it on your PC or tablet.
  • For the ability to search for letters (by the name or address of the sender, or simply by individual words), IMAP developers deserve special gratitude from users whose mailboxes are constantly overcrowded, but not fully studied.
  • You can easily manipulate individual parts of letters and forward them to other recipients. And in general, the capabilities of working with mail allow you to systematize it into various categories, archive it, and filter out spam.
  • IMAP works well with different accounts.

  • Messages can be marked with special flags, allowing you to plan and organize work with incoming correspondence.

In fact, IMAP has much more capabilities. It all depends on what you need. For example, to transfer a file from one device to another, I simply attach it to a draft, which is accessible to me from any gadget. But let's not get distracted and continue. I hope you have already decided what to choose for yourself, POP3 or IMAP. And now we need to know what to do next.

Where can I get POP3/IMAP settings?

And then you need to specify the appropriate parameters in the mail client settings. Usually you need to specify the type account(POP3 or IMAP), separate incoming and outgoing mail servers, user data, server port number and other parameters.

Fortunately, all well-known services such as Gmail, Yandex Mail, Microsoft Exchange support both protocols. And of course they provide relevant information on their websites. I think that you can easily find it and handle the settings yourself.

Now the “discussion” on the topic of POP3 or IMAP is over. All the arguments are at your disposal, and I consider my mission accomplished.

With this I wish everyone every success and say goodbye to you, my dear readers.



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