Basics about email accounts

If you have an email address with your ISP (internet service provider), or any other non-web based email accounts, you can set it up so that your messages are downloaded onto your PC. There are various email clients (programs) that you can use for this.

Before you can set up an email address you will need a note of some settings for your account:

POP/POP3

Short for Post Office Protocol – this is the most common protocol used by email clients for retrieving messages. It allows users to leave messages on the remote server to be downloaded onto more than one machine or remove them from the server immediately so that they only exist on the user's machine.

IMAP

Short for Internet Message Access Protocol – this is an alternative method of retrieving email messages, which retains all messages on the server until the user deletes them. You would normally be able to use either POP3 or IMAP within your email client, but the majority of ISPs will only support one of these – most likely POP3.

SMTP

Short for Simple Message Transfer Protocol – this is the protocol used to send messages – it specifies the recipients of the message and the message text itself.

When setting up an email address, you will be required to enter the incoming and outgoing servers to be used for your messages – these will normally be:
pop.mail.yourdomain.com
and
smtp.mail.yourdomain.com
– however, your ISP will provide all of the relevant details in your account information.

It is also sometimes possible to access HTTP email through an email client – this could be for, example,a Hotmail account – you would have live access to the server at all times, and deleting an email on your machine would also delete it from the server.

HTTP

Short for HyperText Transfer Protocol – this is the protocol used for web pages – you will have noticed that web addresses always begin with "http://" - this specifies to your computer how the data should be interpreted.

Port Numbers

One of the terms you will see in your email account settings is Port Numbers – for the most part you will not need to make any changes to these, however, some ISPs use non-default ports for sending emails through to help ensure a measure of security (avoiding spam sending etc).

Each computer (and server) has a large number of ports through which data travel, depending on the destination of the data, or the kind of data involved. In regard to emails, the default ports used are network port 25 for sending emails via SMTP, and network port 110 for receiving emails via POP3. Some email providers, such as Yahoo! require you to use network port 587 for outgoing SMTP mail instead – other providers may use different ports.

Again, if you need to use a non-default setting, your ISP / email provider will give you the correct settings.

Typical Email Settings