POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol Version 3. The “governing body” that specifies how POP3 works is the IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF main website is www.ietf.org. You can find more information about POP3 on the IETF RFC Editor website – www.rfc-editor.org. Predominantly though the POP3 specification document can be found at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1939.txt.

POP3 stands for “Post Office Protocol” implying POP3 is a protocol which is a universal standard method of communicating between computers, in POP3's case, specifically for checking a mailbox and your email, downloading the email, and deleting or removing it from the server to your local machine. The RFC tells us, “the POP3 protocol is used to allow a workstation to retrieve email that the server is holding for it.” To simplify this more so, POP3 is what’s used to access your incoming email.

When Outlook or Outlook Express for example are configured properly, it will check for email in your POP3 mailbox on the server and bring any emails into your Outlook Inbox by downloading them. You can determine how frequently you would like it to check for your email by clicking tools and then options within Outlook and specifiying this within the general tab.

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It is also specified by the IETF, and you can find more detailed information about SMTP at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2821.txt.

As the name “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol” tells us, SMTP is a protocol like POP3, but in this case it is specifically for sending out email. According to the RFC, “the objective of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is to transfer email reliably and efficiently.” Simply, SMTP is what’s used to send outgoing email on your domain.

Normally, well in most cases you will configure Outlook to check for and receive email from you POP3 server at the same time it Sends mail out through your SMTP server.

To configure Outlook to send and receive mail using POP3/SMTP, you’ll need to know the following information, which is provided by your hosting company:

• The name of your POP3 server, E.G., pop.your-domain-name.co.uk
• Your POP3 Username on the server, E.G., my-username
• Your POP3 Password on the server, E.G., my-password
• The name of your SMTP Server, E.G., smtp.your-domain-name.co.uk

More information about configuring Microsoft Outlook once you have all of the above information is available here.

Taking a more detailed look at POP3 and SMTP.

You will be given the name of your POP3 Server by your mail hosting company or your corporate systems administrator, in this case UK Superweb will provide you with this information. For home users not hosting a commercial domain name E.G, my-business-website.com your mail hosting company will probably be your Internet Service Provider (ISP) E.G BT, AOL, Tiscali etc. For corporate users, your systems administrator it IT Person can give you the correct information. And for small business users who have set up their own web connectivity, you’ll need to contact whoever is hosting your email, which may be a different company than the one that is providing you with Internet access.

Whatever your case is your POP3 Server name will probably start with “mail”, “pop” or “pop3”, like this:

You will need a Username and Password for your account on this POP3 Server. This Username and Password will identify the mailbox you wish to access for email. It can be some variation of your name or email address, or a seemingly random string of letters or number.

You will be given your Username and Password when your mailbox is created at the time of setup. You may or may not have the ability to specify in advance what you wish your Username and Password to be, otherwise whoever is setting up the mailbox may specify it for you based on a naming convention that is already being used by them. In many cases for security purposes as with UK Superweb you can change your passwords on your account after setup ensuring you are the only person that knows this sensitive information.

To read email you must have a Username and Password to access your mailbox, for security reasons this ensures that your eyes only can access your mailbox.

The name of your SMTP Server must also be obtained from your ISP, IT person and administrator or your mail hosting company. It may or may not be the same as your POP3 Server name. It will usually start with “mail” or “smtp”, like this:

This is a very important point. Security has come alomg way these days as it has always been such a huge issue for everyone, many mail server administrators ot IT people are making it more difficult for unauthorised users to send mail through their mail server. This prevents an SMTP Server from being used to send out Spam or viruses. In the process however, it is sometimes difficult for even authorised users to send mail through their designated SMTP server. For this reason, many home users need to use their ISP’s SMTP server rather than their mail hosting company’s mail server. Neither the sender or the receiver of an email experiences any negative effects by sending mail through your ISP’s SMTP Server, in fact, it is the most preferred method these days.

For example, let’s say the email hosting company I use for my mail order business is my-hosting-company.co.uk and my mail order business is called mailorderbusiness.co.uk. My POP3 Server is called pop.mailorderbusiness.co.uk and my SMTP Server is called smtp.mailorderbusiness.co.uk. I could find out that I am not unable to send mail using smtp.mailorderbusiness.co.uk, receiving “Relaying Prohibited” errors instead. In this case, it may be more effective to use my ISP’s SMTP Server for outgoing email, for example, smtp.btconnect.com.

At the centre of the issue is that you don’t typically use a Username and Password to identify yourself to your SMTP Server by authenticating it, as you do to your POP3 Server. And we’ve already said that mail server administrators can’t let just anybody send mail out though their servers, so how do they know whether to allow your email to go through or not if you’re not using a User Name? They make this decision based on your IP Address. And your IP Address generally is assigned by your ISP. Therefore, if you try to send mail out through your ISP’s SMTP Server, the SMTP Server will see that your IP Address is within the range given by the ISP to its customers and allow the email to be sent out. Sounds complicated, but it’s really not!

In Outlook XP, (Outlook Express is not to different) select Tools / E-mail Accounts... Select Add a new e-mail account. Select POP3. Enter Your Name as you’d like it to appear to your email recipients, in my case “David Horowitz”. Enter your E-mail Address as you’d like it to appear to your recipients. Enter the names of your POP3 and SMTP Servers, and enter the User Name and Password for your POP3 mailbox.

It’s always a good idea to now click the Test Account Setting at this point, which will test five areas for you before you go any further:

1. Your ability to connect to the Internet - Are you connected basically
2. Access to the POP3 Server you specified
3. Access to the SMTP Server you specified
4. Your ability to log onto the POP3 Server using the Username and Password you specified
5. Your ability to send a test e-mail message to yourself through your SMTP Server

You need to pass all five tests to have a working email system setup correctly. If any one of the these areas fails, you should check the corresponding settings and go back over your steps. E.G if you fail Step 2, you may have entered your POP3 Server name incorrectly. If you fail Step 3, you should check the SMTP Server name you specified. If you fail step 4, then you should check the Username and Password you entered to make sure there are no typo's, and if you did not you may well need to contact your mail hosting company for assistance in resolving this problem. If you fail Step 5, you may be unable to send mail through the SMTP Server you specified due to reasons mentioned earlier, that you are not permitted to relay mail through this SMTP Server. You may try your ISP’s SMTP Server instead in this case.

There’s is much more to learn about using POP3 and SMTP email, but the information here will give you a start. The instructions given are for Outlook XP yet other email clients such as Outlook Express as mentioned here and Mozilla Firefox work in a similar styles. If you feel like experimenting, there are more advanced options available on the More Settings… button in the Tools / E-mail Accounts… option. Any questions> We are always here to help if you are a hosted client 0800 169 3266, if not why not register your own domain name and start emailing today with UK Superweb!