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Email

Email

Here's a quick explanation of some of the terms that are used when talking about email hosting.

Email client

An email client is a computer program that lets you read and send email. Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail are all email clients. Email clients talk to email servers.

Email server

An email servers is a computer attached to the Internet that stores your email when others send them to you, and sends emails out on your behalf when you send an email from your mail client. Your hosting provider normally own and runs the email server. Email clients and servers talk to each other using protocols.

Protocols

POP, IMAP and SMTP are protocols, they're the language that your email client uses to talk to the email server. The P at the end of POP, IMAP and SMTP stands for protocol.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)

IMAP allows you to view your email from more than one place. E.g. from your desktop computer at work and from your laptop at home and from abroad and from your mobile device - multiple locations. To use IMAP effectively, you need to make sure that each program on each computer that you use to view your email is set up to use IMAP.

With IMAP all of your email is stored on email server which has a quota limit. If you run out of space you will not be able to receive new emails into your account.

POP (Post Office Protocol)

POP is older than IMAP, designed for the age where you accessed emails on a single device. Emails are downloaded from the server and stored locally on the client machine. If you try and set up more than one device to access a mailbox using POP you will find that emails randomly go to one device OR the other, not both. You can work round this limitation but it frequently causes confusion and so we strongly recommend that you use IMAP. Oh, and definitely don't mix them because that's just asking for bother.

The only advantage to using POP is that your emails are not left on the server and so your mailbox doesn't get full, however, this is overcome easily by archiving email periodically.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)

POP and IMAP are both used to talk to the email server to get your email, SMTP is the name of the protocol that is used to send email.

Help with getting set up

We have a couple of pages to help get your email set up correctly: