What is POP3 Email?

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What is POP3 Email?


POP3 is a term we come across very often when talking about emails. POP3 stands for 'Post Office Protocol version 3". This refers to the protocol used in receiving emails from an internet server.

If you are using any of the following email clients, Outlook express, Outlook, Netscapte mail or Eudora then you are using POP3. With POP3, the server receives all your emails and stores it in the server. You can connect to this server and download all your emails to your computer and then read it offline even when you are not connected to Internet.

But some internet websites use web servers to exchange emails. For examples the free yahoo and hotmails are web mails. In these emails, you can read your emails only from these websites. And you can also reply to emails only from these websites. However you can pay a small amount to enable POP3 in these email accounts. AOL server does not provide POP3 access.

But there are some softwares that enable accessing webmails such as yahoo without paying. E-Prompter is one such software. But it is not legal to use these software. Even if you can access the webmail using these softwares you cannot get the attachments. You can only get attachments directly from these websites.