Selecting Right Email System for Your Business Between POP and Exchange

According to the latest 2018 email statistics report, around 120 billion business emails sent and received every day. This supports the fact that email use is strong in the corporate world. There are ...

According to the latest 2018 email statistics report, around 120 billion business emails sent and received every day. This supports the fact that email use is strong in the corporate world. There are tons of options in a business email like web mail, IMAP, POP and Exchange, the latter two being the popular ones.

An organization follows a policy of using one email system to keep things simple. Here we have discussed the two most popular email systems – Microsoft Exchange and POP3. By the end of this post, you would be able to decide which email system is right for your business.

POP3

POP3 or POP is one of the simplest email protocols existing today. POP is short for Post Office Protocol. POP3 is still used by several business organizations due to its simplicity. In POP3, the emails are downloaded to the local device.

If you have a small business setup and don’t want to invest in email server, POP3 might be right for you. One of the advantages of POP3 is you can use it various email clients like MacMail, Thunderbird, and Outlook. In POP3, the email client connects to the email server and downloads the mail. It means you can also access your mails (ones that are downloaded) in offline mode.

One of the limitations of POP3 is there is no copy of the email on the server. In simple words, once you download the mail, it is removed from the server. This means if the mail on your device is accidentally deleted, it is gone forever.

Advantages

·  Simple to configure and implement

·  No licenses required which means no expenses for organizations

·  Supported by almost all device(universal adoption)

According to experts, POP3 is ideal for you if you want a simple mail solution. In POP3, all messages are downloaded to the inbox and you don’t need to organize mail. Before you decide whether between POP and Exchange, let’s take a closer look at Microsoft Exchange mail.

Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange is an enterprise level email solution used by several multinational organizations. It is a proprietary email platform developed by Microsoft which only runs on Windows. To use Microsoft Exchange, you need server and user licenses. Microsoft Exchange offers all functionalities of IMAP. In addition, it has several features for better collaboration between staff.

Some of the advanced collaboration features you get in Microsoft Exchange are shared calendars and address books, shared file storage and native integration with other Microsoft Office products and SharePoint.

Advantages

·  Instead of downloading the mail, Microsoft Exchange creates a copy of the email on your device

·  Supports folders that allow organization of emails

·  Incoming and sent messages are always stored on the server

·  Licenses can be purchased per server, per server to manage costs.

Now that you have learned about the advantages and limitations of POP and Exchange, you can go ahead and choose an email system that delivers more value to your business mission.

Do you’ve any questions? Please feel free to comment.