6.2 POP3 clients

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POP3 is the "Post Office Protocol," the first general-purpose email client protocol approved by the IETF. POP3 client access has been supported since Exchange 5.0, but the protocol's use has steadily declined to a point where there is no good reason to ever connect a POP3 client unless you really want to. POP3 is a very simple protocol that revolves around a single server-based folder-the Inbox-and limits client functionality to a basic set of messaging operations. You can certainly read messages by using POP3 to download the messages to the client, but functionality rapidly runs out afterward.

POP3 is also a receive-only protocol, so the client sends outgoing messages by making an SMTP connection to a server, which may be the same physical computer as the POP3 server but does not have to be. Indeed, in an ISP environment, it is very common to have a bank of mailbox servers accessed by POP3 for message retrieval and a separate (usually smaller) set used for SMTP traffic. Exchange normally acts as the SMTP server for both POP3 and IMAP4 clients.

In passing, Windows 2003 servers now include a basic POP3 service that you can use with POP3 clients. Because POP3 is so basic, Windows delivers the same features as Exchange, but Exchange scores on administration, multi-protocol access to mailboxes, and so on, so it is much preferable to use Exchange as the server if you need to support more than a few POP3 clients.



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Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrators Pocket Consultant
ISBN: 0735619786
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

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