POP In A Nutshell

When you receive an email, it sits in a file called your "INBOX" in your email service provider's computers. If you wish to view this email message you must access this file somehow. There are several ways of doing this: a web-based interface known as "WebMail", or via a program such as Microsoft Outlook or Eudora running on your personal computer. In order for the program running on your computer to talk to your email provider's computers and get your email messages, your computer and their computer must "speak the same language" so that they can understand each other. There are really only two languages that email computers understand -- the "Internet Message Access Protocol" (IMAP) and the "Post Office Protocol" (POP).

POP is intended to be used in situations where you wish to connect to your email service provider's computers periodically and download all of your new email to your personal computer. This has the following advantages:

• Once downloaded, you can view your email anytime you want on your personal computer, even if you are NOT connected to the Internet.
• If you connect to your email service provider frequently, there will not be much of a buildup of email there and thus you will not use much of their disk space (which may save you money).

POP also has the following disadvantages:

• All of the email is downloaded to one personal computer, so you cannot access your email from any other computers once it has been downloaded. This may be an issue if you are traveling or need to access your email from several different computers in different locations.
• If your computer "dies" or gets a virus, you may lose all of your email unless you have made backups.

IMAP service, which LuxSci also provides, has the opposite advantages and disadvantages. Read about IMAP email services.

To learn more about how POP works and the security issues involved in sending and receiving email, read Understanding Email Services: What are they and what do you need? and The Case for Secure Email.

LuxSci's POP Email Hosting Services

LuxSci provides POP email services to all of its email and web hosting clients (all clients also receive IMAP, WebMail, and SMTP services).

Using LuxSci's POP email services, you can download your email at any time using your favorite email programs from anywhere in the world, so long as you have an Internet connection. LuxSci has step-by-step online instructions for configuring your email programs for use with its services, so it is quick and easy to get setup.

LuxSci also provides secure POP -- POP connections over SSL. Using this service, your username, password, and message contents are encrypted so that no one can "eavesdrop" on this information as it travels between LuxSci's servers and your personal computer. Secure POP services are a standard part of all email and web hosting plans. Account administrators can optionally force all of their users to connect to POP only securely over SSL.

LuxSci provides multiple ports for POP connections to help our users with difficulty connecting to our servers due to firewalls blocking the usual ports. In addition to the standard ports 110 for normal insecure POP and port 995 for secure POP over SSL, users may now optionally connect to their LuxSci POP server using port 2110 for normal insecure POP and port 2995 for secure POP over SSL.

LuxSci's POP server also supports the "UIDPlus" extension to enable your POP email client to perform its operations in a more efficient fashion.

Ordering

To order POP services at LuxSci, use our Custom Package Wizard to design your email services package. Make sure to select "POP" services in Step 3.