What is IMAP?
What exactly is IMAP?
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It's the standard way a mail program (such as Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail) connects to your mailbox to show and manage your email.
Explanation
The distinctive thing about IMAP is that your email stays on the server. Your program essentially shows a synchronised view of what's on the server. Move a message to a folder or mark it as read, and that action is updated on the server so all your other devices see the same state.
That's exactly the big difference with POP, where messages are instead downloaded to a single device. If you want to weigh the two against each other, read IMAP or POP: which do you choose.
Example
In the morning you read an email on your phone and move it to the "Invoices" folder. When you open your laptop later, that same email is neatly there in "Invoices" too. You don't have to do anything twice: the mailbox is the same everywhere.
When do you choose IMAP?
If you use your email on more than one device (for example a laptop and a phone) then IMAP is almost always the right choice, because everything stays in sync. Only if you deliberately want to work on one fixed device and keep your mail locally can POP make sense.
Related concepts
At Mailflux, IMAP works by default, so you have the same mailbox on every device: in the browser or in your own mail program.