EMAIL:

Email is a online messaging system and is one of the many ways to communicate. Even though email is not one of the fastest ways to send messages, it is one of the most popular. You can send the messages from one computer to one or more people on a network. People all around the world use email as a more high-tech way to send messages. Something that is a lot like email could be a post office, messages come and go from all over the world carrying all sorts of things.

PROTOCOLS:

POP is one of the oldest protocols.  IMAP is one of the newer protocols. It retrieves inbound messages and keeps them on the server. MAPI is Microsoft’s email protocol. It is a refined version of IMAP specifically for Outlook.  SMTP is used for outgoing mail. IMAP and POP are used for incoming mail and both use SMTP for outgoing mail.