IMAP vs. POP3

[Mikey B]

I was just wondering if most of y'all set up your accounts on mail.app as IMAP or POP3. I'm trying to figure out if one has a major advantage over the other for me.

 

[Queso]

I use IMAP to Google Mail. If you have more than one iPhone/Mac it is the easiest way to keep the e-mail on both in sync. You can also send from any location without having to mess around with SMTP settings.

 

[r6girl]

Wirelessly posted (my iphone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

While Google allows you to choose to use either protocol with their gmail service, other email providers may not. So, you probably don't have a choice with other email accounts you have and you will need to select IMAP or POP according to what they offer, not which one you want. If you choose a protocol not supported by your email provider, it won't work because of the incorrect settings.