Does anyone still use POP3?

If so what program do you use?

I think they just left it in their list of deprecated protocols. POP3, which allows only messages to be delivered to the user's inbox, is an obsolete standard for mail transfer. In the 2000s, when many ISPs and email systems stopped supporting POP3, Microsoft released its own version of POP3 called the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol.

EAS and POP3 are not compatible with each other. EAS also supports IMAP4 and SMTP. The EAS specification was developed by Microsoft's R&D department for the purpose of interoperating with existing Microsoft Exchange servers.

EAS does not require a username and password on the POP3 server, as well as not requiring the server to authenticate the user before delivering mail. Instead, EAS uses a proprietary authentication and encryption protocol called Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which requires a digital certificate on the client computer.

I'm on Mac OS 10.8.2 and using Mail.app. I'd like to start using another service but not sure which one. The main criteria is that it supports EAS and has a good web interface. Any ideas?

I use the web interface to my Gmail account at Hotmail, and I don't think it supports EAS. Outlook supports EAS (I use it on Windows 7) but I use that for work.

The only other one I can think of is Gmail. It doesn't support EAS, but you can check your settings under account settings and see what your options are (there should be something under "Advanced").

Google Apps, which is what Gmail is part of, does support EAS, although I don't use it and can't tell you how. It seems that EAS is more of a Microsoft-only thing. If you want to use an alternative, you might have better luck with the IMAP support in Gmail. Of course, you can't directly access it through the web, but it does work via POP3.

I'm going to guess that there is no one-size-fits-all answer here. If you are running iOS, then iCloud may work for you. If you are on OSX, I believe the default option for Mail.app is to connect to an iCloud account, but you can choose from a number of other options.

Is POP3 faster than IMAP?

I am currently looking at a new email client and it seems that everyone is saying that POP3 is faster than IMAP.

Why is this? Is POP3 in any way better than IMAP or is this an example of people who are not using their software correctly? POP3 just downloads the messages from the mail server to your machine. IMAP is more than that. It also does things like give a message list of what the server has, which you can then access from whatever application you're running on. As far as speed, it might be quicker if you only download some of the messages to your machine.

It's really a preference. I prefer imap because I can access the mail from multiple machines. Also I like the email history for later reading. I also sync my email to multiple clients at once so that is handy. For most people I think they both work fine for them so it's probably based on what they are going to use it for.

IMAP is faster than POP3 in many ways: It's usually not much slower in download speed, but I use POP3's -I option to force them to delete messages older than 7 days. On my system, POP3 uses 5 MB of memory more than IMAP, but it's likely not much slower, since it uses so little (not so much as Evolution). IMAP saves messages on the server side, POP3 only stores them on the client side. You don't need to use an external email program to access your mails, you can do that from within Thunderbird (or whatever mail app you want).

However, you can configure POP3 clients to access the imap services (by default it doesn't), and since they use different protocols, you need to have separate accounts and configurations (and some of them don't support imap). Actually, I've noticed many people are using IMAP even though they are using Gmail for most of their activity.

What is more secure, IMAP or POP?

When choosing a mail client on Linux?

In case of email users, there has been some major news lately that both the big brands Google and Microsoft have officially announced that they are going to be abandoning the POP3 protocol in favor of IMAP. The switch-over is scheduled for sometime this year. I have heard it both said that POP3 has become unsafe with the advent of S/MIME and more recently SSL. Now we all know about S/MIME but you would still have to trust your mail server and/or your network administrator that is not currently using it. That is certainly going to increase the number of compromised mail servers. A POP vs. IMAP question should also give us a hint of what is more secure IMAP or POP3. The answer depends on the server security that is offered by each protocol. However we should still not let these new protocols affect our decision in using them. Here is my top 5 reasons to choose between IMAP and POP3, although there are tons of other options out there.

IMAP, POP3 vs. Microsoft Exchange: Why Microsoft Exchange is bad. It may sound harsh but Exchange is considered as one of the biggest mail server out there. You would get your email sent to your account from any device with an Internet connection. So there you go, email has now become a very central component in our computer system. You may think that if you do not use it means that your emails won't be accessible remotely but it's not like that. With the help of third party client applications (mail clients), you can check your emails when you are away from home. If you don't like using third party clients, you can go for a webmail or web based mail services. Many services are starting to give away cheap Internet access to their users. So if you just want fast access then there is no problem that you should really miss. However, this type of service may cost you quite a lot compared to normal mailbox. This is where Exchange server comes in the picture. So many people out there are now enjoying the convenience of having exchange emails at their fingertips.

A lot of servers run Exchange but not many are protected by SPAM filters so they open their doors wide to spammers who are already taking advantage of the holes that the company creates. Exchange is notorious for its slow response time.