When setting up your email, you have two main options: POP3 and IMAP. Each protocol for sending and receiving email has unique strengths. Using them together can give you the best of both. Knowing how they work can help you avoid problems and optimise your email experience.
Let’s break down these two email options in a way that’s easy to understand, so you can set email up according to your needs.
What are POP3 and IMAP?
- POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3): POP3 downloads email from your email server to your device (computer, phone, tablet, etc.). Once downloaded, you can read your emails even if you’re not connected to the Internet. It is designed to store emails locally, making it a great choice for keeping a copy of all your messages on one device automatically.
- IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): IMAP is like a window into your email, which stays on the email server. Your device simply accesses the messages and leaves them there (unless you move them to a local folder). IMAP can be ideal for checking your emails from multiple devices, as changes are synced across all your devices in real time. For example, if you delete an email on one device, it disappears from all of them, and if you reply to an email, your reply will show on all devices.
Benefits of Using POP3 and IMAP
If you want to store your emails on one primary device but also need to check them on other devices, using both POP3 and IMAP can be your best solution. First, let’s look at the advantages of each protocol for accessing email.
POP3 for Local Storage and Organization
Here’s how POP3 helps with efficient email management:
- Ease of saving messages: Messages are automatically saved on your local device as soon as they are downloaded.
- Automatic cleanup: Most email programs (also called “email clients”) have a POP3 setting to control when emails already downloaded will be deleted from the server. The default is usually after 14 days, but you can change that.1 This way, your server’s mailbox won’t get full, but you still have enough time to view messages on other devices. You can also set the program not to delete emails on the server at all, but then you will need to log into webmail periodically to clear out old messages to keep incoming emails from being rejected with a “mailbox full” error (unless you also set up an IMAP account and delete them there, which we’ll get to in a bit).2 A related email setting controls whether or not email you delete on your local device are also immediately deleted from the server.3
- Save on server storage space: You won’t need as much server space because your email program will automatically delete older emails on the server, while keeping copies on your own hard drive. Especially when you have accumulated a large number of messages, this can save you money you would otherwise have to pay for extra server storage space.
- Custom filtering: POP3 allows you to set up filters that automatically sort your emails into folders as soon as they come in based on criteria you specify (such as who sent it or specific words or phrases used in the message). Note that this folder organization will only be shown in the POP3 account where you have set up the filters. You can keep your inbox tidy and organized, with messages stored safely on your device.4
IMAP for Real-Time Access on Multiple Devices
If you also set up an IMAP account, you can access your mailbox as it exists on the server, giving you up-to-date access across all your devices. Here’s how IMAP can enhance your email setup:
- “Sent” folder syncing: Sending emails from your IMAP account makes your sent messages appear in the “Sent” folder on all devices. This feature is especially useful if you want to keep track of your communication across devices.
- “Junk” mail access: IMAP also lets you see the contents of your “Junk” or “Spam” folder directly in your email client, which means you don’t have to log into webmail to review it. This is handy if you need to check for incorrectly flagged messages.
- Automatic syncing: Since IMAP mirrors the server’s contents, any changes you make (like deleting or moving messages) will be reflected on all devices. When emails are removed from the server, they’re also removed from your IMAP account, which keeps your view consistent on each device.
Setting Up POP3 and IMAP Together
To get the best of both worlds, you can set up both a POP3 and an IMAP account for the same email address:
- POP3 Account: Configure this on your main device for storing emails locally. Set it to delete emails from the server after a specified period (e.g., 14 days). This gives you a local backup and prevents your server mailbox from becoming full.
- IMAP Account: Configure this on all devices where you want real-time access to your emails. With IMAP, your “Sent” emails are synchronized across devices, and you can access your “Junk” mail folder from any device without needing webmail.
POP3 has Problems with Sent Messages and Spam that Adding IMAP Solves
POP3 downloads messages only from the email account’s inbox on the server. If the server filters out junk mail first, those messages will never been seen via POP3.5 POP3 does not download from the junk mail folder, nor does it upload to your server’s email account any messages you send from your PC or other device. Therefore, you cannot view on another device what you sent using POP3. Likewise for other server-side folders, such as any set up for filtering email at the server level.
To add to the confusion, your device’s local email program may show its own “Junk” or “Spam” folder, and it may even put some emails into it automatically (depending upon its own spam-recognizing capabilities), but these will not match what is in the similar folder on the server. That means when you go looking for a missing message, you may not realize that you need to check spam folders in Web mail as well as in your local program.
The POP3 Plus IMAP Spam Folder Workaround
If you want to avoid having to log into Web mail but you still want to use POP3, the solution is to add the email account a second time to your local email program, this time specifying the IMAP protocol. You will get duplicate emails, but the number will be relatively small and the duplication will be self-correcting after the number of days that the POP3 account setting for email retention specifies.
Admittedly, this could be confusing for several reasons:
- If you sometimes read email in the POP3 account and other times in the IMAP account, each email will only be marked as “read” in the account in which you read it. Decide where you want to show it as “read” and use that account consistently for reading new emails.
- If you delete an email from the IMAP account, it won’t be deleted from the POP3 account if the message was already downloaded there, so you will need to delete it manually in the POP3 account also.
- If you delete an email from the IMAP account but the POP3 account has not downloaded it yet, it will never appear in the POP3 account because it won’t be in the server’s inbox when POP3 next retrieves new emails. (If your IMAP account is set to move deleted emails to the “Trash” folder, you will still be able to retrieve it from IMAP’s trash for a while.)
If you want all your devices to show it as “read” regardless of which device you are currently using, check your email in the IMAP account only and use the POP3 account only for backup. In that case, I would also recommend you do not let the POP3 account check for email automatically, but only manually when you click the button called something like “Check Email” or “Get Messages.” That way, when POP3 downloads messages, the deleted ones won’t be there to download so you won’t have to delete them manually a second time.
In this case, change the POP3 settings as follows:
- Uncheck the setting for checking email upon startup (when you first start up the program).
- Also turn off the setting for checking email every so many minutes.
The drawback to this approach is that all of the POP3 emails, which you are keeping for archiving purposes, will be shown as unread.
If you want the POP3 messages to show as “Read” when appropriate more than you care whether IMAP shows this status, then read all your messages in the POP3 account on the device you use most often.
Reading from the POP3 account has another advantage: When you delete a message there, your email program will communicate that to the server, which will also delete the message from the server. That means that you only ever need to delete it from the POP3 account. The IMAP accounts simply synchronize themselves to whatever is currently on the server and the POP3 account would have already taken care of deleted emails there, thereby removing them from IMAP accounts as well. In this case, you can continue to let the email program’s POP3 account check for messages automatically every so many minutes (which is the default behavior for most email programs).
Which Account to Send From?
Email programs generally let you set a default email account for sending from. If you don’t care that sent emails only show up on the device you sent them from, you can use the POP3 account. That way, your sent emails will stay just on that single device. You won’t see them on the server or in any other devices. You also won’t see them in an IMAP account on the same device.
The problem here is that when you do use another device to send an email, you won’t see it in the first device’s POP3 account (unless you add your email address to the “CC” or “BCC” box before you send it, and then the email will arrive in the inbox instead of the sent box). However, if the device you sent from used an IMAP account and the first device has both IMAP and POP3 accounts, you will see the email in the IMAP account.
You can drag or cut and paste the sent emails from one type of account to the other to get them all together. Moving emails from the IMAP account to the POP3 one will remove them from the server at the same time, since IMAP is always syncronized with the server (and in fact IMAP messages are stored on the server, not locally on your device). Moving emails from the POP3 account to the IMAP one will add emails to the server at the same time.
A better solution may be to send exclusively from the IMAP account, which will cause a copy to be uploaded to the server’s sent box, where it can be viewed by an IMAP account on any device. The disadvantage to this approach is that it still won’t show up in the POP3 account, and if you are planning to use the POP3 account for storing old emails, you will have to move the sent emails from the IMAP account periodically. In that case, you will want to be sure your server is set to retain sent emails forever, so that none disappear before you have a chance to move them.
POP3, IMAP, or Both? Choose What Fits Your Workflow
If you only need email on one device and want control over storage, POP3 is a simple choice. However, if you want to check emails across multiple devices, IMAP might be more convenient. And if you want the advantages of both—local storage on one device and real-time access on others—you can set up both POP3 and IMAP for the same email account. This hybrid setup offers flexibility, organization, and consistency, making it an ideal choice for many users.
Conclusion
Using POP3 and IMAP together may sound complex, but it’s a powerful combination that helps you manage your emails effectively, once you understand how each works. By configuring POP3 to store emails locally and IMAP to sync messages across devices, you get the best of both email protocols. Give it a try and see how you like it!
You can always switch back to just one protocol, but be sure that the type of account you want to keep has all the emails you want there before you delete the other account.
Footnotes
- I usually change the retention period to 30 or 60 days so that the server is my backup for recent emails and I have plenty of time to view emails on other devices. ↩︎
- Note that multiple devices using POP3 each have their own setting for deleting emails, and whichever device has the shortest retention period will control when they will be deleted. ↩︎
- As long as your deleted emails automatically go to the “Trash” folder on your local device, having them deleted from the server at the same time is pretty safe because you can still retrieve them from “Trash” until you or the program empties (deletes) the trash. Look for a setting that controls whether or not messages in the “Trash” folder get automatically deleted after a certain number of days, and make sure that is set to a number you are comfortable with. ↩︎
- “Safely” is of course a relative term. I recommend you back up your device regularly, either to a storage service on the Web such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, or to an external device, such as an external hard drive or USB drive. Be sure to include the files you email program uses for email storage in the files and folders you tell your backup program to back up. Search online for “how to back up” and the name of your email program. The search results should include instructions about which files you need to back up for the email program you are using. ↩︎
- While some hosting companies let you turn off the feature to move spam to the “Junk” folder (while often adding to the subject line something like “**spam**”), you may need administrator access to do so. ↩︎