Q: What is the difference between POP, IMAP and Microsoft Exchange

A: All three are types of email services. Only Microsoft Exchange provides true synchronisation with your cloud-services and devices; including contacts, calendar items and emails. You may say that is what icloud is for but icloud.com is owned by Apple and it is not your domain. 

POP downloads email to the device. The device receiving it can then either remove the original copy from receiving the server it came from or leave the copy there depending on the settings set on first setup. By default, Outlook leaves a copy of messages on the server only for 14 days which is great, because then it doesn’t take up all the server space, slowing it down and possibly costing more in web-hosting disk space.

If it removes emails, then another device cannot also download them. If two devices are removing them from the server then emails are scattered between the two on a first-come-first-serve basis. The benefit of POP is that you download your emails and therefore you should have all your emails stored locally on the device in a .pst file. Hopefully, you haven’t been using Mac Mail, or a weird phone email app, or the Windows Mail application. If you have, hopefully you’ve setup an IMAP account and not POP.

IMAP is old-school synchronisation. It’s what businesses and people used before Microsoft Exchange became affordable to small businesses and individuals and mostly started paying for itself faster. If you really can’t afford Microsoft 365 Business Basic or an Online Exchange Plan 1 service, then you will probably be using IMAP (for almost the same price anyway). When express-installing on a device these days, it generally sets up an IMAP account unless specified differently in the initial account settings. One cannot simply change from POP to IMAP or the other way around after initial setup, it would need to be setup again correctly.

IMAP is great in that if you read an email on your phone, it will sync with the server and update your computer or other devices that it is read. If you send an email from one device, it will copy that sent item on the other devices and moving emails between folders works the same way, assuming you have setup sync of the folders correctly. IMAP generally keeps a cached copy of the emails on a laptop or computer in the form of a .ost (dot-oh-ess-tee) file in applications like Outlook. However, if not then there is often a dependency on the original server in order to access the emails. One can easily break email and archives by incorrectly moving Outlook data files around or changing the wrong settings. We can often resolve these issues if they arise, sooner rather than later.

EXCHANGE is a Microsoft product. Historically it was only realistically accessible to the medium, large and corporate sectors as it was a significant investment to implement the internal infrastructure required to run an exchange server with power backup and so on. The implementation of faster internet around the world resulting in the reality and then commercial implementation of cloud services meant that now even a single individual can access business-class corporate domain, communication and management platforms that were previously not within budget or the realm of possibility.

To summarise significantly, you just don’t really have to worry about email problems anymore. As an IT support provider for many years, this is an awesome benefit for us too.