Any web developer will tell you setting up email for a client can be the bane of their life. I know when I ran my own company and was providing all hosting services, 90% of the support queries we took were in regards to email.
In the last 2 years I’ve moved completely away from this aspect of business, however because I work in the online industry, everyone asks me for advice. Now I simply say “Google Apps” and point them at this fantastic solution. I’m going to guess that almost 60% of businesses could get away with using Google Apps for their entire online presence. Here in NZ almost 65% of businesses don’t even have a website - Google Apps could solve that.
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When it comes to the internet there is a lot of jargon thrown around and many people don’t know what these words & terms mean. What I hope to do with this series is unwrap some of this jargon so anyone can understand. Often small business owners, or organisation leaders need to make technology decisions but get bamboozled by the terms.
I’m going to start with email jargon, in particular 3 terms often bandied around. SMTP, IMAP and POP.
POP: stands for Post Office Protocol. This is an older technology used for the retrieval of email from the mail server to your local computer. This is a simple fetch type technology, it does nothing else other than get your email from one place and put it in another.
SMTP: stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This is the technology that mail servers use for sending mail from one to another. Your computer will use SMTP to take an email you have written and pass it to the mail server of your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Their server will then use SMTP to pass it to the mail server of the person you sent the email too.
Simple right, POP to fetch the mail, SMTP to deliver it. Think of POP as you going to your mail box to fetch the mail. SMTP is the postie who delivers the mail from the post office to your mail box.
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