What is POP3 Email?
All About POP3 Email
POP3 is one of the most popular e-mail services on the
Internet. It's been around for many years and it provides a way for people to
get their e-mail conveniently and has several features, which make it quite
advantageous. There are some significant disadvantages with POP3, however, and
it's important to remember that this e-mail system has been around for quite a
long time. According to many users, there are better alternatives for e-mail
service out there than POP3.
The Basics
POP3 e-mail is a service that leaves your e-mail on your
server or deletes it off your server depending upon your preference. The
biggest difference between it and other e-mail services is that a local copy of
the e-mails that you download are stored on your own system. This can be good
or bad, depending upon your perspective. If you aren't worried about disk
space, POP3 e-mail is advantageous in that you can access your e-mail whenever
you wish, whether you happen to be online at the time or not. The local storage
feature of POP3 e-mail can be disadvantageous if you're worried about your hard
drive space being eaten up by e-mails and attachments.
The concept of being online or offline is one that is
becoming more and more dated. As you can guess, POP3 e-mail really had its
heyday when people used to have to dial up to connect to the Internet. After
dialing up, they could hit send and receive--or whatever equivalent their email
client had--and check their e-mail. If they had e-mail, the messages would be
downloaded to the hard drive. If they didn't, any messages they had in their
outbox would be sent through the server. If this is bringing back flashbacks of
having to download thousands of spam messages that you didn't even want, you
are remembering one of the most significant disadvantages of POP3 e-mail
service. Imagine doing an e-mail search through thousands of spam messages to
find something useful and you will have recalled one of the most painful things
about POP3 as the dominant e-mail service.
The Advantages
POP3 e-mail is not all bad. In the aforementioned example,
the fact that POP3 e-mail stores all of your e-mails on your computer was shown
to be something of a disadvantage, in certain situations, particularly where
storing messages that you didn't want was concerned. One of the advantages of
POP3 was the fact that you could do an e-mail search or anything else with your
e-mail when you weren't hooked up to the Internet. This may not seem that
important right now, given that Internet connections are ubiquitous. Imagine,
however, being able to compose an e-mail off-line and being able to hold off on
sending it until you got a chance to read it later. One of the advantages of
POP3 was that it did add something of a barrier between writing an e-mail and
hitting the send button.
POP3 e-mail is accessed using an e-mail client. These
include programs such as Outlook, Outlook express, Eudora and many more. Some
of these programs are free and some of them you have to pay for. Eudora is
supported by advertisements. POP3 e-mail has fallen out of popularity a bit since
the advent of free Internet e-mail accounts. It definitely does have its
advantages, however, it is still plays a very important role in the business
world. Many e-mail servers that are used by corporations operate on POP3
protocols and they provide reliable, fast and secure service to the businesses
that employ them. This e-mail protocol may have been around for a long time,
but it is still important today.