Home PC Tip # 5: POP? IMAP? All I want to do is get my email to work! For 99.9% of us, email is our main tool for our day to day communication. If there was to be any interruption to this vital service, we would feel lost. For those of us who rely on emails for work, loss of our email service can lead to far more drastic consequences and can cause incredible frustration within minutes. Most of you who are Windows users will use Microsoft Outlook, which is an email client to which you can add and manage various email accounts. For those who have their email accounts already added onto Outlook through an exchange server, you will most likely have an ‘IT Guy’ who will come to your computer, type a few numbers, click a few buttons and hey presto! Your lifeline is enabled… Whilst it may be a relatively straight forward process for someone who is familiar with Outlook and email jargon to set up an account within Outlook, for most of us, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever! When going through the set up of emails accounts within Outlook, you will see POP3, SMTP and IMAP time and again, so what do these mean? POP3 (Standard Port = 110) POP3 Stands for ‘Post Office Protocol’. This is an internet standard protocol which is used by local email clients, such as Outlook to retrieve emails from a remote server. POP has been developed through several versions, hence POP3 simply means Post Office Protocol version 3. Essentially, POP3 as a service, contacts the remote server (to which your emails are delivered), downloads them to the email client (Outlook) and then the emails are deleted from the server. Although there are settings within Outlook to keep the emails on the remote server, should you choose to do so. SMTP (Standard Port = 25) SMTP stands for ‘Simple Mail Transfer Protocol’, which enables a local email client to send emails. The important thing to note is that emails are not sent from your email client to the intended recipient directly, they will be sent to a mail server, which will then relay the email messages to the intended recipients. IMAP (Standard Port = 143) This is another Internet protocol that is used by an email client to access email on a remote mail server. Email clients that use IMAP will generally leave messages on the remote server until the user deletes them. This feature generally allows multiple devices to manage the same mailbox, so essentially, if you delete an email on your iPhone, it will not be there on Outlook when you open your account. So I don’t have an ‘IT guy’, and I need to add my Windows Live account to Outlook. Most of the time, you will be able to add an email account by just providing your email account and password, and a function called AutoDiscover will take care of the rest. But if that does not happen, you will need the following four things before you attempt to add an email account to Outlook. 1. Your email address 2. Your password 3. The Incoming Server Name (POP3); or IMAP Server name 4. The Outgoing Server Name (SMTP) Say for example: you have put your Windows Live account and password in and it does not work. The first thing you need to do is ‘Google’ “Windows Live server names”. Or, if your emails are hosted by another provider, such as emirates.net.ae, you should be able to find the server settings on the internet fairly quickly, and most of these sites will contain detailed instructions on how to add these emails to Outlook. If you have an email account which you only access via web-mail and have Outlook sitting on your computer unused, why not try to add your account, or accounts to this one place. Once you have done it a couple of times, you will be able to add email accounts with confidence. Click office.microsoft/en-001/outlook-help/add-or-remove-an-e-mail-account-HA001231634.aspx#BM5 for more detailed instructions on how to add an email account to Outlook. Stay tuned for the next post…
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 05:29:49 +0000