What Is Email Protocol?

Hello friends as you know that email protocol is a method by which a communication channel is established between two computers and email is transferred between them. When an email is transferred, a mail server and two computers are involved. One computer sends the mail and the other one receives it. The mail server stores the mail and lets the receiving device access it and download it if needed. There are four different mail protocols.

1)POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3):-

This is a simple, standardized protocol that allows users to access their mailboxes on the Internet and download messages to their computers. The simple design of POP3 allows casual email users who have a temporary Internet connection (dial-up access) to access emails. They can read their emails, draft new emails or reply to emails while they are offline, and can send these emails when they are back online. Yahoo! Mail (mail.yahoo.com) is an example of a mail server that uses POP3 protocol.




2)IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol):-

This is a standard protocol used for email transfer by users. Like POP3, it also supports both online and offline modes of email access. The email message is downloaded to the user's machine only when a specific request is made to read it. Users can download mails to their computers while keeping a copy on the server. The mails on the server are the primary copy and anything changed on the local machine is updated by what is on the server.Users can also create new mailboxes which are shown as folders on the server, and move messages between folders. This feature allows access to shared and public folders.Gmail is an example of a mail server which uses IMAP protocol.

3)SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol):-

SMTP is a simple, text-based protocol that works best when devices are interconnected to each other. However, SMTP protocol can only be used to send emails. Unlike POP3 and IMAP protocols, SMTP does not provide the functionality to the users to retrieve emails from the server.One of the main issues with SMTP is the lack of sender email authentication. SMTP lacks security features too and thus users get spam emails.UNIX systems and simple applications like "mailsend" make use of SMTP protocol.

4)HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol):-

 HTTP is not used exclusively for mail transfer, but it plays a vital part for users who use Internet browsers for accessing their mails (both for sending and receiving).Hotmail and Yahoo! use HTTP protocol for accessing emails through the Internet.

 Thanks Friends....