Some email terms
A reader sent me a message yesterday concerning an email problem he is having. One of his comments was that he didn’t understand what was meant by “POP” and I suspect a lot of average PC users don’t know the term. POP stands for “post office protocol”. Most of the time, it isn’t necessary to be concerned with the details of how email works but, as befell my correspondent, sometimes you need to know about the nitty-gritty of an email account. Here is a brief outline.
If you ever have to configure email software like Outlook Express or Windows Mail to set up an email account, you’ll usually need to know what is known as the POP3 address (the “3” is there because email uses the third version of POP). This address is for obtaining mail that has been sent to you. Incoming mail first comes to a special computer server with the POP3 address that belongs to your email service provider and then is relayed to you when you ask to read it. If you need it, you can obtain the POP3 address from your provider. An example of a POP3 address is the one for Verizon, which is “incoming.verizon.net”. (There is also another method of receiving mail called IMAP but that is much less common on home PCs.)
There is a separate server address for mail that you send. This may or may not be the same address as the POP3 address for receiving mail. However, it has the separate name of SMTP (simple mail transport protocol). When you send mail, it first goes to the computer server with the SMTP address of your provider and then is relayed to whatever Internet address is indicated. For example, the SMTP address for Verizon is “outgoing.verizon.net”.
- In summary:
- Someone sends you email–>Goes to your provider’s POP3 server–>Comes to your computer
- You send an email–>Goes to your provider’s SMTP server–>Goes to recipient
If you read your mail at a Web-based service like Yahoo, you are actually reading the mail on the Yahoo server, not your own computer. Similarly, when you compose and send mail from a Yahoo page, you are working from a remote computer. However, you may be able to download mail from a Web-based service to your own computer; you may also be able to compose mail in something like Outlook Express on your computer and then mail it via the Web-based service. But not all web services allow this. If a service does have this feature, it will have to provide you with a POP3 and a SMTP address.
In a later post I’ll put up a slide show giving directions for configuring an email account on your computer software.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.