IMAP versus POP
Posted on May 29, 2008
Filed Under Technology, Computing |
Official Gmail Blog: Getting Gmail anywhere: IMAP versus POP
I had this discussion with my students Monday night and I’ve been fighting with a client’s email problem because of POP, so the timing of this couldn’t be any better.
The virtues of POP lie solely in from the perspective of the email provider. Hold the mail only until the receiver fetches it. Back in the day of expensive disk space that made perfect sense. Distribute the data load over all the clients instead of storing everything. Problem with this is, as my client’s case demonstrates, that “as a backup” people don’t want to remove messages from the server. The other reason is that if they do then the emails will not be available via webmail access or mobile devices.
IMAP give you 2 way communication, storage, and access between the server and any client. This is the level of service users desire and it is an easy solution to provide. Disk space is cheap and so is bandwidth. So if your email provider/IT department will only provide you with POP access, you deserve more and you deserve better.
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