In 2013, the majority of
email traffic comes from business email, which accounts for over 100 billion
emails sent and received per day. Email remains the predominant form of
communication in the business space. This trend is expected to continue, and
business email will account for over 132 billion emails sent and received per
day by the end of 2017.
‘Email me’, ‘Ping me’, ‘Send
me a note’ these are just some of the phrases we use every day, the human
population are sending more emails than ever, but do you know which email
service you use? Do you know what it means? This article should help explain.
POP3, Post Office
Protocol
POP, or Post Office Protocol, is a way
of retrieving email information that dates back to a very different internet
than we use today. POP was a dead simple way to download copies of emails for
offline reading, then remove those mails from the remote server. The first
version of POP was created in 1984, with the POP2 revision created in early
1985.
POP3 is still a very popular email
protocol. POP3 creates local copies of emails and removes the original from the
mail server it came from. This means emails won’t sync across devices, causing
issues when trying to take advantage of using different devices as you’re on
the move.
IMAP, Internet Message Access
Protocol
IMAP was created in 1986, the idea
behind this email protocol was to give users flexibility allowing them to use a
different number of devices and have their emails synced across them all.
IMAP does allow users to access mail via
email client or web-mail interfaces and view the same emails, because the emails
are kept on remote email servers until the user deletes them. Because IMAP
stores emails on a remote mail server, you’ll have a limited mailbox size
depending on the settings provided by the email service. If you have huge
numbers of emails you want to keep, you could run into problems sending and
receiving mail when your box is full.
IMAP has become extremely more popular
since most modern day users need access to their email not only on their PC but
also their tablet, Smart Phone and any other devices which support IMAP
configuration.
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange was
developed shortly after POP and IMAP, it allowed Microsoft to realise what
users had and what businesses would need. Exchange allows users to not only
sync emails across all devices but it will also sync your contacts and
calendars as well, this then allows for features like calendar sharing and
global contact lists.
With the modern day
world promoting cloud technology even more and offering products like Office
365, it will allow companies to get hold of Exchange at a much more reasonable
and flexible cost.
Which Email service do
you use? Can you see the benefits from Exchange and IMAP?
