POP3 and SMTP

Okay it’s been a very long time, but I am back and ready to do a thrilling post on EMAIL. I was at my ambulance job today and my boss was having trouble with her email. It’s not a very big company so they are not using an exchange server to send and receive email. This is the first time that I have worked on a setup such as this so I thought it would make a good blog post. Here are some of the things that I found out. First instead of a in house server they were using the website provider as the email service. The income server was a pop3 server and the outgoing server was an SMTP server. This is were it dawned on me that I could not recall the difference between theses protocols
POP3 stands for Post office protocol and the current version which is 3
pop3 is the protocol used to communicate between your email client (such as outlook) and your ISP that is saving your email on their POP3 server. POP3s overall function is to handle incoming messages. POP3 was designed to delete the messages off the server and transfer them to the computer where the email client is installed. This behavior was one of the problems for my boss. When outlook was started on her computer at work she was no longer able to access them on her blackberry or on the web GUI when she got home. Another protocol called IMAP could have been the solution to her problem, but these are things that I am not in control of in this situation.



SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SMTP is the protocol used to communicate between your email client and the SMTP server that will forward your messages on to the desired destination.






reference section:
http://ask-leo.com/what_is_pop_or_pop3_or_a_pop_account_and_what_about_smtp.html

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/definition/POP3