When it comes to checking your mail, unless you want to use a web-based interface, you will need to use your mail client to connect to your mail server to download your messages. There are two protocols for accomplishing this, POP and IMAP. POP is what I had always used since the first time I ever set up an email account. It was simple, everyone else used it, and it worked; so I never really thought about trying anything else. I now realize that I could have saved myself a lot of trouble over the past 10 years if I had learned about the strengths of IMAP long ago.

POP is a very simple protocol. There is one mailbox, and there are two operations that you can perform on messages in it: Download and Erase. This is quite adequate when you have only one ma