It’s also useful if you want to free up your inbox space if it’s almost full. POP3 is ideal if you use one device to access your emails and want to view them offline.
On the other hand, IMAP is a two-way protocol that stores the emails on the remote web server, and not on your device.
However, POP3 is a one-way incoming mail protocol that stores your emails on your devices and deletes it from the web server’s inbox. Difference Between IMAP and POP3īoth protocols are used for incoming mail and email clients to retrieve your messages from mail servers, whether you’re using a web-based or client-based application. The latest version, POP3, lets you download your emails to your device and read them offline while reducing the space your email account takes up on the web server. However, you can only access the email from the same device you downloaded it to, so if you try to access it from a different device, the emails won’t be available. If you have a server with limited free memory, POP will come handy in such cases.