Deciding whether to use POP or IMAP

We recommend that most customers access their email using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) as it has a number of advantages over POP (Post Office Protocol) and no real disadvantages for most people.

By using IMAP all your email will be stored on our servers and wherever you access it from your all of your emails will be available to you. This includes flagged messages, replied/forwarded status and your entire folder structure.

If you only ever access your email on one device or wish to download your email and not store it on the Runbox servers, you could use POP to do this.  There are options to use POP and leave your email on the the server, and also ways to make sure copies of sent email can be stored on our servers. However, if you wish to do this it would be easier to use IMAP.

If you decided to use POP then by default your email client will probably download your email to your computer and remove it from our servers.  This means if you then try to log in and view your email with a web browser, you will not see it. Messages that are sent whilst your account is set up to use POP will not be copied to our servers and you will only be able to read them on the computer that you sent the message from.