What are they, how do they work and what should I use?
What is POP3 email?
POP3 stands for ‘Post Office Protocol version 3’. POP3 email is one of the oldest email protocols, designed in the days of low bandwidth to enable emails to be processed and read offline, freeing up servers once they had been downloaded.
How POP3 works
When sent, an email message is delivered to a mail server. When you check your email, your email client or webmail provider (for example, Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, OS X Mail) connects to your mail server and downloads your email from the server to your computer or mobile device. Once an email has been downloaded to your email client or webmail account, it is removed from the server altogether.
When an email is downloaded to a computer or other device via POP3, that email is only accessible via that device; you won’t be able to find it on another computer.
The problem with POP3
In the modern age of PCs, laptops, tablets and mobiles, using an email system which doesn’t enable you to view your messages remotely or through ‘the cloud’ can be extremely frustrating. You can’t save or view messages across multiple devices, and messages sent from one device aren’t copied to the Sent Items folder on your others which makes the creation of an email audit trail in business very difficult.
Because messages and attachments are downloaded locally, you will also be using up valuable hard drive space on each device. Email folders which become corrupted through POP3 are sometimes lost permanently. Even if you can recover them, this can be a time-consuming and rather painful exercise.
Why upgrade to Hosted Exchange?
Hosted Exchange is our recommended alternative to POP3 email services; it’s much more flexible, affordable and reliable. Emails are stored on a remote server managed by your services provider.
When you download your email, you can access it across all devices from a Microsoft Exchange inbox such as Outlook. They’ll remain in the remote server until you delete them, so you know you’ll always be able to find what you need regardless of where you are or which device you’re using.
Benefits of an upgrade to Hosted Exchange include:
- its affordability and accessibility for small businesses. Whether you’re a one-man band or running a large team, Hosted Exchange email data will always be stored and managed off-site by your provider for one monthly cost per mailbox;
- within one Exchange account you can manage contacts, calendars, notes and tasks, so it’s much more than just an email channel;
- you can get it anywhere! Whether on PC, laptop, mobile or tablet, you’ll be able to retrieve, read and handle your emails on wifi, 3G or 4G connections. Boring dinner party? Might as well check your emails!
- Its great capacity; Hosted Exchange 2016 mailboxes are huge – up to 100GB – so you can store emails and attachments freely;
- ease of maintenance and budgeting. You pay one price to a provider who takes care of your migration, data storage and ongoing maintenance so you don’t need to store anything yourself; and
- mailboxes provided through CRE8 are supplied with secure UK-based hosting and support, ensuring that your data is stored safely, backed up and supported by a UK team whenever you need it.
How can we help?
For all of our web and email hosting clients, we want to make sure that your systems work for you.
If you’re not sure what the best option is for your business email, or you’d like to change to something more suited to your needs, get in touch with Jordan and he’ll be pleased to help!
Contact us here!