What is the difference between SMTP and IMAP protocol?

What is IMAP on my email account?

I'm having trouble using it.

If you are using Gmail, then you must use IMAP. If you use the Gmail web interface, you can also access your email with POP3.

If you use another email program, there are many email clients that support IMAP. For example, Thunderbird supports IMAP.

IMAP has many advantages: You can access your email from any computer (provided it has a valid IMAP account). You can access your mail even if you are offline. You can search your email from any computer. You can move your email to another account (eg backup or archiving). You can delete old emails.

What is POP and IMAP protocol?

POP and IMAP are protocols used by most email clients to download and store mail messages.

Both the protocols operate on a central server and retrieve mail from the server. POP is considered to be obsolete, and IMAP is considered to be the standard protocol.

Pop mail from server in Gmail. IMAP is the most secure of the protocols, and it allows the recipient to see the message in the order it arrived. The mail client displays the messages in a special folder called the inbox. The inbox can be expanded or collapsed to make it easier to view the messages.

IMAP is the standard for most email clients, but many people still use POP. POP is quicker, but requires more disk space than IMAP, and it doesn't allow the recipient to see the messages in the order they were sent.

IMAP downloads the entire mail folder, while POP downloads only the new messages. POP does not support the ability to edit or delete mail messages from the server. POP allows you to download messages from a mail server, while IMAP requires that you check the mail server to see if there are new messages. IMAP allows you to create mail folders, called labels, that group mail messages by subject. You can create one or more folders and add labels to each of them. If a message contains a link to another mail message, you can click the link and see the message at the same time.

POP mail messages can be sorted, and they can be moved into folders. If you delete a message from your server, it is deleted permanently. You can also delete a message from your mail client, and then later you can move it into a folder.

IMAP messages can be deleted from the server and moved into folders, and they can be labeled. If you delete a message, you can also delete it from your client.

To use IMAP, you must have an email account with the IMAP service provider. Your email provider will usually provide the IMAP service as part of your mail service.

IMAP is the standard for email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird, but most mail servers use POP. POP allows you to download messages to your computer without downloading all the mail from the server. POP uses less bandwidth than IMAP, and is better suited for networks with slow connections.

Is IMAP a TCP or UDP?

I'm trying to get the right terminology here.

I think of IMAP as a TCP service. But, I've also seen it referred to as an UDP service.

Is there an official term for what I'm referring to, and what are the pros and cons of using the term UDP? Is my usage of TCP being correct in that I see IMAP as a stream data transfer protocol, such as HTTP? We use "TCP" because it's the protocol definition as provided by. I don't see why people would consider an IPV4 or IPV6 protocol as anything other than a "streaming protocol" or just call it a "data transfer protocol" for the sake of convenience (as much as we try to be a little more accurate in the terminology) -- either in a networking setting, a database environment or in an email exchange. The reason that I was asking, was because when I wanted to discuss this point at work last week, someone asked me why do you want to talk about that and this came up as part of my answer. I agree, but sometimes you have to go one step further than "This is a TCP/IP protocol". I prefer to call them streaming protocols so people will be less confused. For example, HTTP is often mistakenly called an application protocol. There's nothing inherently wrong with calling IMAP TCP/IP and that's really what its all about. Of course, the main driver is still DNS, so if you wanted to get technical about it, the UDP for IMAP would be 1.2.3.4:143 (although it could be anything). Also, the first three bits of TCP headers are the transport protocol (UDP, TCP or IPX), so it really doesn't matter much.

What do you mean by "If it has TCP/IP in the name, we can assume its a TCP service"? We know DNS is UDP based and SMTP is TCP based. I don't know why a company would name a mail system "IMAP", especially given the fact that we know IMAP runs over TCP, not UDP. It might be part of some business marketing scheme, or a bad mistake in a support document or something.