Questions and Answers

What is POP3 E-Mail?

This article explains the general use of the POP3 E-mail protocol.

POP3 means "Post Office Protocol 3", a widespread standard relating to the delivery and receipt of electronic mail, and is offered by the vast majority of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It's nothing to do with "The Post Office".

You are offered "multiple user" POP3 E-mail as part of the web service. This means that under a single domain name of myname.co.uk, many usernames can be attached, such as fred@myname.co.uk, harry@myname.co.uk and so on.

However all incoming E-mail is placed in a single E-mail box to await collection. Under this system, all mail to anyone@myname.co.uk arrives in the myname.co.uk box and is fetched in one session. E-mail software (e.g. Outlook Express) can then be used to sort all the incoming messages into different folders.

The benefit of POP3 E-mail is that it offers greater control of how you actually manage your incoming E-mail. POP3 really comes into its own when E-mail needs to be dealt with by people in several locations, because (depending on your software) you can often choose whether to still keep an E-mail on the server, even after you have read it.

If you are "on the road" you can pick up POP3 E-mail on a laptop and then dial-in from a separate location (e.g. home) and fetch the E-mail again onto your home system, or colleagues can fetch it as well.

There may be times when an individual POP3 mailbox with individual password may be needed, which can be provided for a cost.

With some E-mail software, POP3 mail can help prevent very large file attachments from blocking your incoming E-mail feed, because the user can choose the maximum size of messages to be downloaded onto the client E-mail system from the server. POP3 E-mail can also be deleted from the server automatically, once you have read the message on your own local system.

All configuration details are provided to help our clients set up their E-mail. As a minimum, you should check the configuration options of your E-mail software client carefully to ensure that both the POP3 (incoming) and SMTP (outgoing) server addresses, user names and passwords are correctly configured. Then set up sort or filter rules to handle multiple users or departments.

All in all, the POP3 E-mail protocol offers the user a variety of methods for managing his or her incoming E-mail. An alternative to POP3 is IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) which is not supported by many ISPs at the moment though this may change.

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