At one.com it is entirely up to you how you want to use mail. With webmail you are guaranteed to always be able to read and send mail, regardless of which computer you are online from. Choose IMAP for flexible access to all your sent and received mails, select POP if you just want to have your mail in one place.
Select your preferred way to use mail on POP3 or IMAP. POP3 (often just called POP) is an abbreviation for "Post Office Protocol" and IMAP stands for "Internet Message Access Protocol." Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. Generally, we recommend using IMAP mail.
Choosing an email setup with IMAP at one.com, keeps a copy of all your mails on the mail server. In case your hard disk crashes or your computer gets stolen, you will not lose valuable data. one.com's backup protects your mail against almost any risk, one can imagine.
When reading email using IMAP, your email client saves a local copy, but leaves a copy of the mail on the server too. The mail is kept there until you delete it, so your inbox always looks the same whether you look at it e.g. from your smartphone or your computer.
It's always a good idea to keep identical copies of the same data in different places, in case there is a technical breakdown. IMAP protocol automatically saves a copy of all emails locally on your computer and on the server. If your hard drive breaks or your computer is stolen or damaged, you would risk losing all the messages you have saved locally. But with IMAP they are still safely stored on the server.
Maybe you already use email on your mobile phone. one.com gives you easy access to your IMAP mail accounts from both Windows, Linux and Mac computers as well as from the iPhone, iPad and most smartphones. With IMAP, all your received and sent mails are always within your reach, no matter what device or what platform you use.
If you choose to use POP to retrieve your emails, the email is deleted from the server when you download your mail. This means that the local copy is your only copy of the email. POP mail can sometimes be an advantage. POP uses bandwidth more efficiently than IMAP, which may be advantageous for slow Internet connections. Furthermore, POP provides no limitations on the size of your Inbox.
Maybe some day you choose to switch from Apple Mail to Mozilla Thunderbird or the other way around. If you use POP mail, it means that you can not easily transfer your old mail archives into the new mail program. With IMAP, any change of email program can be made in just a few minutes and it is easy to download all your mail from the server without any hassle.
