You have been a regular user of email services since its inception for work and entertainment purposes. Whether you use a web-server based email like Gmail or Outlook.com or you use the company networked emails, you must have come across the options of POP and Exchange. These actually refer to the different email options. Email falls under three major categories:
1. POP
2. IMAP
3. Email exchange hosting
POP
Post office protocol (POP), offers a way to interact with the mail servers. It basically works by downloading the emails for offline reading. If you open your email server and download the emails, the emails will be deleted from the mail server and will only be available on your laptop or PC. If you try to access them using POP on any other device then they will not show up. There are some pros and cons associated with the POP system. They are:
The pros are:
o They help to download the emails to one location and hence keeps a single copy easy to maintain.
o It is a very common and easy way to handle the email system.
The cons associated with it are
o The POP offers no message syncing
o The email once downloaded onto the PC, disappears completely from the email server
o The POP system does not offer any contact or data syncing.
Exchange server
This is the most complex type of email system found in email options list. It is technically called Messaging application programming interface. This was developed by Microsoft.
The Exchange Protocol has been built to assist the users to sync their emails, contacts, and other features between the email clients and services. This type of Exchange server is widely used in business. The Exchange server is a computer server that stores your email address, contact number, address, and files and gives access to them at all times securely from any computer. The Exchange protocol lets you:
1. Securely access the email servers remotely. You can access the email server using any medium such as web, or any mobile device (iPhone, blackberry, Google, and android systems)
2. It helps to manage and sync the contact information
3. It gives you the security and backup of all your data.
Like every email option, the exchange protocol too comes with a list of pros and cons.
The pros are:
o The exchange protocol allows full email message syncing feature.
o The messages are stored on the email server and the PC.
o Most of the mobile phones support the Exchange protocol.
o The emails can be unsent or even, modified if it is sent within the server’s domain.
In spite of many pros some of its cons are:
o The exchange server is an expensive system to implement and make use of.
o When the Exchange protocol is used, often syncing errors may appear which difficult and cumbersome task to troubleshoot.
o Not every desktop or Laptop or mobile can support exchange protocol fully.
