POP3 or IMAP? Which is Best?It's great that some companies offer two different ways to connect Outlook to their email service. On this site I've provided detailed instructions on how to set up such accounts. All you have to do is decide which way you want to make the connection. By the time you finish reading this page, you will have made that decision. A Quick Review of POP3 and IMAPHere's a really quick review of what POP3 and IMAP do from our perspective as Outlook users.POP3POP3 lets you send and receive webmail messages with Outlook. Outlook copies messages from your webmail account into your Outlook Inbox. You can set it up to delete the messages from the webmail mailbox when Outlook copies them, or to leave a copy in the webmail mailbox (deleting them is usually best).When you work with a message in one place, the changes you make don't show up in the other place. For example, if you delete one of these messages in Outlook, it doesn't affect what you see in the webmail mailbox. Or if you move a message from one folder to another in the webmail mailbox, nothing happens to it in Outlook. All POP3 does is let you copy messages from your webmail account (deleting them if you wish) into Outlook, and send messages as if they were being sent directly from your webmail account. On the other hand, because POP3 copies the messages into Outlook, you can use Outlook's flags and categories on them. IMAPIMAP lets you send and receive webmail messages with Outlook. Instead of copying messages from the webmail account into the Outlook Inbox, with IMAP, Outlook creates a set of folders that duplicates those in your webmail account.Outlook and the webmail system continually synchronize those messages and folders. Create a folder in your webmail mailbox, and it appears in Outlook. Delete a message in Outlook and it gets deleted in the webmail mailbox. In effect, what you get is an exact replica of your webmail folders and messages within Outlook. If you make changes to the webmail folders in Outlook while your computer is not connected to the Internet, the changes get synchronized the next time Outlook is running and has an Internet connection. One downside to using IMAP is that the protocol doesn't support Outlook's system of flags and categories. How Do I Choose?The big question is: how do I choose between POP3 and IMAP?The answer depends on what you want to do. The big advantage of using POP3 is that messages end up in your Outlook Inbox like any other messages. Once you have everything set up, you can treat your webmail messages the same as all your other messages. This includes full use of flags and categories. If you are a mobile user, or if you have more than one place where you want access to your webmail account, IMAP has big advantages. Because IMAP synchronizes folders and messages with Outlook, you can work with your messages either using Outlook, or directly in your webmail account using any web browser. Even better, if you have multiple computers using Outlook, you can connect each one of them to the webmail account using IMAP. This lets you resolve the old problem of being able to work with your mail on any of your computers. There's also the added bonus that an up-to-date copy of your webmail messages is still available on the webmail company's servers if something bad happens to your computer. On the other hand, with IMAP, your webmail messages go into their own set of Outlook folders, rather than into the Inbox with everything else. So you have two sets of mail folders to attend to in Outlook. And since IMAP doesn't support Outlook's flags and folders, you will not be able to use these with IMAP. So What's the Verdict?Of course, the final decision is yours, but here's what I recommend:
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