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IMAP email accounts allow you to manage your emails with your favorite email client like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird etc.

Many implementations of webmail use IMAP to retrieve e-mail messages from a server and display them within a web browser, making the use of this protocol transparent to the user.

All our hosting accounts come with IMAP email support.

Internet Message Access Protocol (commonly known as IMAP or IMAP4, and previously called Internet Mail Access Protocol, Interactive Mail Access Protocol (RFC 1064), and Interim Mail Access Protocol[3]) is an application layer Internet protocol operating on port 143 that allows a local client to access e-mail on a remote server. The current version, IMAP version 4 revision 1 (IMAP4rev1), is defined by RFC 3501.

IMAP supports both connected (online) and disconnected (offline) modes of operation. E-mail clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. This and other facets of IMAP operation allow multiple clients to access the same mailbox. Most e-mail clients support either POP3 or IMAP to retrieve messages; however, fewer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) support IMAP. IMAP4 offers access to the mail store; the client may store local copies of the messages, but these are considered to be a temporary cache; the server's store is authoritative.

E-mail messages are usually sent to an e-mail server that stores received messages in the recipient's e-mail mailbox. The user retrieves messages with either a web browser or an e-mail client that uses one of a number of e-mail retrieval protocols. Some clients and servers preferentially use vendor-specific, proprietary protocols, but most support the Internet standard protocols, SMTP for sending e-mail and POP3 and IMAP4 for retrieving e-mail, allowing interoperability with other servers and clients. SMTP can also be used for retrieving email; it is more suitable for permanent Internet connection than, say, a dialup connection, and is not supported by most e-mail client software. For example, Microsoft's Outlook client uses a proprietary protocol to communicate with an Exchange server as does IBM's Notes client when communicating with a Domino server, but all of these products also support POP3, IMAP4, and outgoing SMTP. Support for the Internet standard protocols allows many e-mail clients such as Pegasus Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird (see comparison of e-mail clients) to access these servers, and allows the clients to be used with other servers (see list of mail servers). E-mail clients can usually be configured to use either POP3 or IMAP4 to retrieve e-mail and in both cases use SMTP for sending. Most e-mail programs can also use Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for directory services.

IMAP is often used in large networks, for example, a college campus mail system. IMAP allows users to access new messages as fast as the network can deliver them to their computers. With POP3, users either download the e-mail to their computer or access it via the web. Both methods take longer than IMAP over a local network, and the user must download any new mail (e.g. by "refreshing" the page) to see the new messages.
Source: wikipedia

Connected and disconnected modes of operation
When using POP3, clients typically connect to the e-mail server briefly, only as long as it takes to download new messages. When using IMAP4, clients often stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP4 usage pattern can result in faster response times.

Multiple clients simultaneously connected to the same mailbox
The POP3 protocol requires the currently connected client to be the only client connected to the mailbox. In contrast, the IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients.

Access to MIME message parts and partial fetch
Nearly all internet e-mail is transmitted in MIME format, allowing messages to have a tree structure where the leaf nodes are any of a variety of single part content types and the non-leaf nodes are any of a variety of multipart types. The IMAP4 protocol allows clients to separately retrieve any of the individual MIME parts and also to retrieve portions of either individual parts or the entire message. These mechanisms allow clients to retrieve the text portion of a message without retrieving attached files or to stream content as it is being fetched.

Message state information
Through the use of flags defined in the IMAP4 protocol, clients can keep track of message state; for example, whether or not the message has been read, replied to, or deleted. These flags are stored on the server, so different clients accessing the same mailbox at different times can detect state changes made by other clients. POP3 provides no mechanism for clients to store such state information on the server so if a single user accesses a mailbox with two different POP3 clients, state information--such as whether a message has been accessed--cannot be synchronized between the clients. The IMAP4 protocol supports both pre-defined system flags and client defined keywords. System flags indicate state information such as whether a message has been read. Keywords, which are not supported by all IMAP servers, allow messages to be given one or more tags whose meaning is up to the client. Adding user created tags to messages is an operation supported by some web-based email services, such as Gmail.

Multiple mailboxes on the server
IMAP4 clients can create, rename, and/or delete mailboxes (usually presented to the user as folders) on the server, and move messages between mailboxes. Multiple mailbox support also allows servers to provide access to shared and public folders.

Server-side searches
IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches.

Built-in extension mechanism
Reflecting the experience of earlier Internet protocols, IMAP4 defines an explicit mechanism by which it may be extended. Many extensions to the base protocol have been proposed and are in common use. IMAP2bis did not have an extension mechanism, and POP3 now has one defined by RFC 2449.

Source: wikipedia