The POP protocol is often used with email accounts provided by internet service providers for home or personal use. Emails are often removed from the server after downloading, and there is only one-way synchronization between clients and the server.
These characteristics of email accounts using the POP protocol allow internet service providers to reasonably limit the amount of storage space each account requires. It also allows customers to easily retain their emails if they move or choose to switch to another provider.
There are, however, some drawbacks to email accounts that use the POP protocol. As mentioned earlier, POP does not have a two-way synchronization mechanism, so users looking to access their email from multiple computers, devices, or clients may have difficulties, such as missing emails on one or more devices. Also, servers are often built using fault-tolerant systems (such as RAID arrays), as opposed to desktop machines, which can sometimes suffer from higher failure rates.
POP is a standard email protocol that has been around for many years and is therefore widely available and implemented. It supports secure connections, including SSL, TLS, CRAM-MD5, among others. It can also be used with services like fetchmail, to pull email from one mailbox to another.
Clients Supporting the POP Protocol
- Outlook
- Outlook Express
- GMail
- Thunderbird