Tag: email

Email clients

04-Apr-2012

POP3 vs IMAP – A Beginners Guide

Should you use POP3 or IMAP? It’s question we’re often asked here at Domainmonster.com, so lets discuss the two protocols and the advantages of each.

The first thing you need to do before making a decision is to understand what POP3 and IMAP are and of course the difference between the two.

What are they?

Both POP3 and IMAP are protocols that email services use to receive email, be it to an email client such as Outlook or a mobile device.

POP3 – Post Office Protocol 3 is a protocol that has been around for decades. It’s the standard way that a mail service will receive email from a mail server.

IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol is a protocol that is much newer then POP3 and is used by mail products to view your mail as opposed to actually downloading it.

What is the difference to me?

If you decide to configure your email client or mobile device to connect to your mailbox using POP3 then what happens is that the client or device contacts the mailbox and allows them to download the contents of the Inbox to their own local storage. The mail then will only exist on that local storage and would not be available to download via another client or device. It is however worth noting at this point that a number of clients and devices do allow you to enable a setting to ‘keep a copy of the email on the server’ this would then allow them to be download via a second client if required.

When using IMAP with a client or device they will simply connect to the mailbox and display the full mailbox to you without actually downloading the content to local storage. This has the benefit of allowing you to manage your mailbox from multiple clients and devices and seeing the same content.

If you think about your mailbox as a post-box full of letters, and your mail clients and devices as postmen it can become a little easier to understand the basic fundamental differences between the two protocols.

When using POP3 a postman would visit the post-box and empty the contents and take it away with him. If a second postman then arrived he would only have access to the letters that had been placed into the post-box since the first visit.

When using IMAP a postman would visit the post-box and take a copy of the letters and take those copies away with him, then when a second postman arrived he would do the same and still be able to see all of the letters placed into the post-box.

Which one should I use?

Which protocol you decide to use depends mainly on how you will be accessing and managing your email. If you are likely to be viewing your mail from multiple locations, clients or devices then It is usually best to use IMAP. IMAP will allow you to manage your mailbox from all of these different locations and clients while the actual mailbox content remains on the provider’s mail server. If you were to do the same using POP3 with the ‘Keep a copy on the server’ setting enabled then you are in essence simply creating multiple copies of your mailbox and any management of the mail into sub folders would need to be repeated on each individual client.

If you are simply going to be using one email client and do not want to worry about reaching the mailbox size limit, due to the amount of email, then POP3 would be the way to go. This provides a simple service to allow you to download all of your mail to one location managed by you. The mailbox on the provider’s server would always be empty or close to it as a result and so you would never need to worry about reaching the limit.

ConclusionIf in doubt use IMAP, this gives you the ability to manage your mail from a client or device while still giving the peace of mind that there is a backup, on the mail provider’s server, of your mail. However if you are only accessing your mail from one place and need to keep all your mail locally, POP3 may be a better option.

Definitely fake

Messages asking for personal information:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8253

Reporting suspicious messages:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=29381

I ‘ve received this message:

Estimado Usuario de Gmail,

Sus dos correos entrantes se colocaron en estado de espera debido a la reciente actualización de nuestra base de datos. Con el fin de recibir los mensajes haga clic aquí para iniciar sesión y esperar la respuesta de nuestro servidor.

Les pedimos disculpas por las molestias que este cambio les pueda ocasionar y gracias por su comprensión.

Atentamente,

Atención al Cliente.”

It’s a scam called phishing to try steal your private info / password ,  click on the down arrow at the top right of the email and select “Report phishing” from the drop down menu.  This will help Gmail warn others that the email is a scam , or use the following form:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse_phishing

some info :

never give out your password to emailed requests , any email from Google must end @google.com – also click the show details arrow and make sure the domain you see next to the ‘mailed-by’ or ‘signed-by’ lines matches the sender’s email address. If you see messages claiming to be from google.com, but are not properly authenticated as coming from google.com, then they are, phishing messages.   Google will never ask you for your password (other than in their normal sign in screens, etc.). If you ever get an email asking for your password, you can be guaranteed that it isn’t from Google/Gmail.

gpg4usb

To say it straight in only one sentence: gpg4usb is a very easy to use portable-application, which combines a simple text-editor with a GnuPG-frontend to write, encrypt and decrypt your text-messages and files. gpg4usb should work on almost any computer you’re working on, should it be a Linux-machine or even one with a Microsoft-OS running.

Almost the only thing required is an available usb-port you are allowed to access. With this application you can write safe and encrypted messages anywhere you are: should it be an internet-cafe, at work or somewhere else on holiday… and you always have the encryption-keys available for usage!

The usage of gpg4usb should be highly self-describing, since the user-interface and all the options it offers are clear cut: Simply execute the binary on your usb-pendrive and start typing e.g. the Mailtext you want to be encrypted. If you’re done, choose the right gpg/pgp-key for the person you are writing to and hit the encrypt-icon at the top of the application-window. The resulting encrypted text you can save as a text-file to send it as mail-attachment, or copy it directly into your mail-user-agent or webmail-website. To make sure, you can read this message by yourself afterwards, encrypt it for the recipient and to yourself at the same time – if you want, you can mark as much keys as you want to encrypt for.

You want to add a gpg/pgp-key to your mobile keyring? Nothing’s easier than that: just hit the crypto-menue-entry and choose Import Key from File or Import Key from Editor. This means that it’s possible to import an ascii-armored pubkey via file-dialog, or via copy&paste into your editor-window. If you find a key e.g. on a website, just copy it, paste it into the gpg4usb-editor and hit Import Key from Editor – that’s it, and the key shows up on your keyring!

Pasted from <http://gpg4usb.cpunk.de/about.html>

Download

You can get our latest Release v0.3.2 by clicking the download link below. Since v0.2.4 the included executables are upx-compressed by default.

Filename Size* sha1
gpg4usb-0.3.2-1.zip 14.8MB / 18.6MB efeeaeff2883ded6abfe6378113c219e5e897bb0

* Size zipped / unzipped

Just download the zip-File and unzip it onto your usb-pendrive. Then simply change into the folder gpg4usb at your usb-drive, and execute the binary in there:

start_linux or start_windows.exe – should be easy to determine, which one’s yours 😉

Since gpg4usb is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), you can use it on as many machines as you want. Copy it, modify and redistribute it, give gpg4usb to as many people as possible! 

Pasted from <http://gpg4usb.cpunk.de/download.html>

Email clients

04-Apr-2012

POP3 vs IMAP – A Beginners Guide

Should you use POP3 or IMAP? It’s question we’re often asked here at Domainmonster.com, so lets discuss the two protocols and the advantages of each.

The first thing you need to do before making a decision is to understand what POP3 and IMAP are and of course the difference between the two.

What are they?

Both POP3 and IMAP are protocols that email services use to receive email, be it to an email client such as Outlook or a mobile device.

POP3 – Post Office Protocol 3 is a protocol that has been around for decades. It’s the standard way that a mail service will receive email from a mail server.

IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol is a protocol that is much newer then POP3 and is used by mail products to view your mail as opposed to actually downloading it.

What is the difference to me?

If you decide to configure your email client or mobile device to connect to your mailbox using POP3 then what happens is that the client or device contacts the mailbox and allows them to download the contents of the Inbox to their own local storage. The mail then will only exist on that local storage and would not be available to download via another client or device. It is however worth noting at this point that a number of clients and devices do allow you to enable a setting to ‘keep a copy of the email on the server’ this would then allow them to be download via a second client if required.

When using IMAP with a client or device they will simply connect to the mailbox and display the full mailbox to you without actually downloading the content to local storage. This has the benefit of allowing you to manage your mailbox from multiple clients and devices and seeing the same content.

If you think about your mailbox as a post-box full of letters, and your mail clients and devices as postmen it can become a little easier to understand the basic fundamental differences between the two protocols.

When using POP3 a postman would visit the post-box and empty the contents and take it away with him. If a second postman then arrived he would only have access to the letters that had been placed into the post-box since the first visit.

When using IMAP a postman would visit the post-box and take a copy of the letters and take those copies away with him, then when a second postman arrived he would do the same and still be able to see all of the letters placed into the post-box.

Which one should I use?

Which protocol you decide to use depends mainly on how you will be accessing and managing your email. If you are likely to be viewing your mail from multiple locations, clients or devices then It is usually best to use IMAP. IMAP will allow you to manage your mailbox from all of these different locations and clients while the actual mailbox content remains on the provider’s mail server. If you were to do the same using POP3 with the ‘Keep a copy on the server’ setting enabled then you are in essence simply creating multiple copies of your mailbox and any management of the mail into sub folders would need to be repeated on each individual client.

If you are simply going to be using one email client and do not want to worry about reaching the mailbox size limit, due to the amount of email, then POP3 would be the way to go. This provides a simple service to allow you to download all of your mail to one location managed by you. The mailbox on the provider’s server would always be empty or close to it as a result and so you would never need to worry about reaching the limit.

ConclusionIf in doubt use IMAP, this gives you the ability to manage your mail from a client or device while still giving the peace of mind that there is a backup, on the mail provider’s server, of your mail. However if you are only accessing your mail from one place and need to keep all your mail locally, POP3 may be a better option.