just want my company email to work AND I want it to be safe and secure. If given the option, what should I use, POP3 or IMAP

On our system at designhostseo.com, activeblognews.com, and Active Technologies, EVERY e-mail account can use either POP3 or IMAP (check your email provider to see what they use). To us, it is simply two different ways of reading  the mail in your mailbox.

Using POP3, the email is "popped" off of the email server and onto your computer. There's no synchronizing going on. Emails simply move from one place to another. In most POP clients, you can choose to leave a copy of the mail on the server, or to delete it from the server when you download it. POPPING is the best choice if simply want to get online, download your email, and get off line again.

Most companies that use POP3 mail also use an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird to read it. SmartPhones have software that allows you to check your email online and leave it there until your email client downloads it to the desktop.

The downside of POP3 is that once you download your email to your desktop, you cannot view the old emails with any other desktop. So if you are traveling to a customer location, for instance, and they ask you to check to see if you still have the email that they sent you last year, you simply can’t, because it is on the desktop at work.

IMAP is a client email protocol with a sophisticated but easy to use capacity to share, organize, and enable flexible access to multiple users. To an increasing number of organizations IMAP is the next step in email, a viable, cost-effective business email hosting solution.

There are several benefits of an IMAP Email Hosting Account: With this protocol, all your mail stays on the server in multiple folders, some of which you have created and customized. If you want all email related to Bob Jones to be stored in one folder, simply create one on the IMAP Server called Bob Jones.

An IMAP Email Hosting Account enables you to connect to your email from any computer and see all your mail and mail folders. IMAP is a convenient email services solution for busy executives who travel. If you have a dedicated connection to the Internet or you prefer to check your mail from various locations, an IMAP Email Hosting Account is a hassle-free solution.

The main drawback of IMAP is that the emails take up a lot of space on the server. I know folks that keep 1 to 2 gigs of email on their desktop. If those email were on a server, one, it may take come time to actually be able to read new emails, and two, that is a lot of server space. If you have 10 people with 2 gigs of email, that’s 20 gigs. Not good.

All unprotected email servers have vulnerabilities:

Empty  Username - According to RFC 3501, a username must be provided in the IMAP LOGIN command. Not providing a username might indicate an attempt to attack the server. By activating this protection, IPS can detect or prevent IMAP connections with login attempts which do not contain a user.

Empty  Password - According to RFC 3501, a password must be provided in the IMAP LOGIN command. Not providing a password might indicate an attempt to attack the server or enter the IMAP account without permission. In addition, enforcing a non-empty IMAP password policy increases security. By activating this protection, IPS can detect or prevent IMAP connections with login attempts which do not contain a password.

Non-Encrypted Accounts - RFC 3501 defines how to use encrypted TLS sessions for IMAP. By activating this protection, IPS can detect or prevent IMAP connections which are encrypted.

Non Compliant Email- Unexpected characters used in IMAP connections might indicate an attempt to attack the mail server. Such protocol violation is a declaration of a wrong size of IMAP literal arguments, as defined in 3501. By activating this protection, IPS can detect or prevent IMAP connections which cannot be inspected because they violate the IMAP protocol.

Bottom line: Use the email type that best suits your purposes.

Use Email Encryption

User Secure Passwords.

POP and IMAP Comparison Complements of Queen Mary University of London IT Department: