The other day I provided Mel from Winter in Venice instructions on how to configure their mail client. Their mail server was on google. Their mail client were configured using POP.
Apparently most of them are attempting to check their emails from multiple places, sometimes from their computer in their office, sometimes from their computer at home, sometimes from their black berry hand phone. One requirement which I was not priorly informed of.
Just now, right after I finished my event with Ivy and I received an “urgent” call from her. Seems like alot of people are coming to me with “urgent” issues recently, most of the time small escalations actually. Having listened to her problem, I decided to head home and do some research over the internet.
As a result of my research I chanced upon this article on the protocol IMAP and the protocol POP.
Apparently if you are using POP, after you have read the mail once from the mail server, the next time you attempt and reading from the mail server from another client, this current mail no longer gets downloaded.
IMAP does exactly the opposite. Even if you have downloaded and read a mail from the server, the next time you attempt to use a different mail client to retrieve mails from your mail server, the same mail will get downloaded again.
Thus that explains the differences which I understand between IMAP and POP thus far.