IMAP Protocol

Usually; after downloading mails to her computer using POP, the user moves the email to an email folder depending on the subject or the sender (e.g. there could be one folder for all emails from friends, another folder for all emails containing jokes, etc). However, there are situations when the user wants these folders to be created on the server. Why is this required? Remember that POP downloads emails to the user's computer. Now suppose a user uses POP in the office to retrieve emails. What would happen if the user now wants to access these emails from home? Since the emails would be downloaded on the user's computer in the office, they would have been removed from the server. The user would not be able to access them from home even if she has a POP client installed at home.

To deal with such situations, the Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) was introduced. IMAP allows creation of folders on a remote IMAP server, and allows them to be accessed from any IMAP client from anywhere. Clearly, IMAP server has to maintain folders/sub folders for all IMAP users. Therefore, it is more complex than POP.

To summarize, although the basic philosophy of IMAP is the same as that of POP, POP involves downloading of messages on to the client computer, whereas IMAP allows retention and manipulation of messages on the server.

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