Incoming Mail Server Useful information and guides on daily email usage

Incoming Mail Server

If you use Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo etc to send and receive emails, you may have heard about incoming mail server or we termed them as (POP3 ,IMAP,HTTP) and Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP). To send and retrieve emails across the World Wide Web we must always use a standard protocol which was especially designed for email exchanges across the network and it is called (SMTP). Incoming mail server is unique in the sense that no email account can register with more than 1 incoming mail server. As technology advances progressively, almost majority of the people owns at least a email account to communicate with their friends or business counterparts. In order to access the email accounts and check the messages, we would use application that allows users to read, send, forward, delete the messages. In the Internet Technology this programs are called E-mail Clients.

Nowadays we can have 2 types of email clients to choose from: Web browser email application which we use to log in on our Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail account or dedicated email clients like Outlook which does the same. As for incoming mail server we have 3 types of protocols controlling if the emails are being send in the right way.

POP3: It is the most used server protocol or method to receive and send emails. POP3 store the emails until the client pick them up. After which POP3 will deletes the retrieved mails from its own servers. This is one of the most used methods to check emails all over the world. The disadvantages of POP3 are:

1. It does not allow the same email account to log in from multiple computers
2. It does not save the mails on the server

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): Basically it does the same job as POP3.It allows users to access emails from the servers. However IMAP has some great advantages such as the protocol is more user-friendly and keeps the data organized in folders on the server. So the 3 main advantages of IMAP are:

1. It allows the email account to connect from multiple computers in the same time.
2. It saves the emails on the servers even after the client pick up and downloaded the messages.
3. It is organized in folders and thus makes this protocol more user friendly.

HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is the protocol used by WWW (World Wide Web) which determine the formatting of the emails and control actions of web servers. If we put a web address on the browser then it will takes the prefix HTTP to transmit the requested page.

Incoming mail server is a must for most email networks. Everyday engineers are trying to make these protocols work better and smarter so that end users like you and me will benefits from the email usage although it is transparent to us.