In this post, I’m going to go over some email basics you should know. I apologize in advance for those of you who are well-versed in email terms. Still, we often have people who log into Remote Technical Support with email issues. Many of these problems could be resolved by the customer if they knew these basic facts.
POP Vs. IMAP
For home customers, there are two kinds of email services. The first is called POP. That’s another of our famous computing-related acronyms. POP stands for Post Office Protocol. POP is the older of the two services dating back to 1984. With POP, a computer user downloads all their emails onto their computing device and the email is deleted from the server. In the early days of computing, when most of us only had one computer, POP worked just fine. However, it doesn’t work well when you are receiving email on more than one device. You could wind up having to move or delete an email individually on each of your computers. Or, you might find that an email downloads onto one device, is deleted from the server and never shows up on additional devices.
Next, we have IMAP. This acronym stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol. In this method, emails stay on the server. This means all devices can receive (sync) emails from the same account. Additionally, if you move or delete on one device, that email will be moved or deleted on all other devices, as long as all devices are set up with IMAP. With the explosion of cell phones, tablets and smartwatches, almost all email is now set up as IMAP.
Webmail Vs. Email Clients
Of all the email basics I’m explaining in this post, these are two of the most misunderstood terms. Yet, they really are the simplest to define. If you open a browser like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or Firefox to go to your email, you are using webmail. On the other hand, if you open an app to read your email, that app is called an email client. Some examples of email clients:
- Microsoft Outlook
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- Mac Mail
- The email app on your smartphone or tablet
- Yahoo Mail app
- Gmail app
If your email is set up on all your devices as an IMAP account, whether you use webmail or a client doesn’t really matter. In the old days, when most email was POP, there was a difference. Mainly, if you used an email client, you were responsible for backing up your email. If your computer crashed and you didn’t have your email backed up, you lost the emails you had saved. With IMAP, your email provider is responsible for backing up your email on their server.
However, I would mention two situations where you might lose all your IMAP mail: 1) if a hacker breaks into your account, he or she could delete all your email (and contacts, by the way) and you’d lose everything; 2) if the email provider has a server crash that only affects a few people, they usually will not restore from backups. (I once lost 6000 emails in this situation. Generally, a provider will restore from backup if an entire email server goes down but not for just a few people.)
Space Limitations
You should note: there is a disadvantage to using IMAP and/or webmail. All email providers have a limit on how much space you can use on their server. For instance, Gmail limits you to 15GB of free storage space. Once you hit that number, you either have to delete emails and attachments or purchase more space. (Fortunately, extra storage space is reasonably priced.)
When emails were stored on our own computers via POP, the only limitation was hard drive size.
Another Of The Email Basics: Encryption
The email most of us use on a daily basis is open text. This means that anyone who intercepts our email can read it. For this reason, you should never put critical personal or financial information in an email. Never email your credit card information, your social security number or your banking log-in data.
True, there are some encrypted email providers such as Proton and Hushmail. There are two downsides to using these types of services: 1) most of them are not free; 2) all parties in an email must have the same service or it’s not true encryption. Still, these types of services are available if you and someone else needed encryption.