6 Things You should Know about Email Types

POP or POP3

POP is the most common type of email mailbox and is probably what most of your email is configured to use. You''ll get a moderate amount of storage with each email account to cater for most needs.

When an email is sent to you, it sits in your mailbox on a web server waiting for you to download it to your local computer.

When you download your emails they are cleared from the remote server and are then just available on your local computer.

You need to download email from a standard POP mailbox to your computer often, as the mailbox can become full quite quickly especially if you receive emails with attachments.

If your mailbox becomes full further emails will NOT be received and will be returned to the sender as undeliverable.

IMAP

IMAP is usually considered a more ''advanced'' type of mailbox and usually comes with far greater storage capacity. It can also come with SPAM filters and virus checkers built in. You usually pay a little more per IMAP email account for these benefits.

If you are using Blackberries™, iPhones™ or other mobile devices to pick up your email, it is advisable to upgrade your email accounts to use an IMAP mailbox.

IMAP mailboxes are tailored to work with both desktop computers and mobile devices.

They allow for multiple devices to log into the same account at the same time so that you can see all of your emails wherever you are. Your emails live on a remote server so you just login to the remote location to see your emails.

This means that your desktop computer, laptop and mobile device can all send and receive the same emails from the same account in perfect synchronisation.

Exchange Email™

Provided by Microsoft, Exchange™ provides more than just email. It brings all of advantages of IMAP and also contacts, calendar, tasks, notes and much closer collaboration with other related Exchange accounts like shared contacts.

This can be considered as the pinnacle of email accounts, providing true email communications and total integration a remote support for software such as Microsoft Outlook.

Email Forwarder

This is basically an alias for another email account. It takes the email sent to it and forwards on the email to another mailbox.

For example chairman@yoursite.co.uk forwards on to the current chairman. When the chairman changes, just change the forwarder. No need to tell everyone, they just keep sending to chairman@ - simple.

Auto Responder

An auto responder can be standalone or attached to another email address. It allows an automated reply to be sent to the originator of an email.

You can use these as an acknowledgement to those who send an email to a specific address.

Group Account

Group accounts are collections of related email addresses and allow for a single email to be forwarded to a specific group of recipients automatically. It''s just like a distribution list.

committee@yoursite.co.uk would send a single email automatically to many other different mailboxes. As the committee changes, simply change the members of the group and different people will receive the committee emails.

Catch All

This is a special type of group mailbox that catches all other emails not addressed to a specific mailbox. This can help to ensure that you get all of your email, even if someone types in your email prefix incorrectly.

This can however vastly increase the amount of SPAM email you may get as you will receive every email you are every sent even to made up accounts.