POP is on life support and it is time to pull the plug
POP stands for Post-Office Protocol, which hey, sounds pretty awesome. Well, besides the name, there isn’t anything too particularly spectacular about POP. It’s an old and outdated method to manage your emails from a time when cell phones were lucky to have brick breaker on them. BlueMail is a fantastic example of how the right email client can be adversely effected by POP. With POP, the mail server is an expensive and glorified mailbox that you still have to fetch your emails from.
You may be asking, “But why would they ever make this? Who would possibly want to manually fetch anything these days? This sounds like a recipe for disaster.” and you wouldn’t be wrong. However, POP really took off during a time period when Betamax and VHS were in a battle for superiority (the 80s for millennials).
POP is a locally oriented protocol because when it was developed, the cost of storage was almost $300 per Mb! Why would you pay to maintain multiple copies of an email on many different devices? The idea of passing around only one copy of an email became very appealing for businesses and IT departments.
For a while this worked. The average user only had one computer at work and the infrastructure wasn’t there to be able to work from home easily. But when more and more devices began to access the same email account, a massive disadvantage was brought to light. POP could not keep the same email synchronized between every device and to fix this would require a steady stream of data.
Well as time progressed and Moore’s Law sprang into action, the storage cost of data went from nearly $1 per Mb at the turn of the millennium, to a minuscule 1/3rd of a cent per Mb as of last year. Devices became much more widespread and the excuse that data was expensive was no longer valid. The industry needed a new way to handle email. Something faster, more efficient and reliable needed to be developed; and fast.
IMAP was born and addressed perhaps the biggest shortcoming of POP. Maintaining a synchronized copy of the same email no matter where or when the email was accessed. This is where BlueMail comes in. By having this synchronized copy, features such as staring an email, creating a task list, and even backing up accounts become more fluid with IMAP using BlueMail.
So do your email a favor and Drop the POP.