{"id":1763,"date":"2021-05-20T10:57:32","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T07:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scalahosting.com\/kb\/?p=1763"},"modified":"2025-11-27T13:39:49","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T11:39:49","slug":"how-to-setup-email-account-client-setup-ssl-tls-settings-pop-imap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scalahosting.com\/kb\/how-to-setup-email-account-client-setup-ssl-tls-settings-pop-imap\/","title":{"rendered":"Email Setup IMAP POP SSL\/TLS Settings"},"content":{"rendered":"

People who are used to checking their<\/span> Yahoo and Gmail inboxes<\/b> through a browser may be a bit intimidated by the prospect of configuring their account to work with an email client (or application). The truth is, there’s nothing too complicated about setting up such an application, especially if you know how it works. With this article, we’ll make sure you do.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is an email client?<\/b><\/h2>\n

An email client is a desktop or mobile application <\/b>that retrieves emails from your mail server and displays them on your computer or smartphone. The immediate notification you receive whenever a new message appears in your inbox is the main advantage of this setup. Still, there are other benefits like the broader set of management and filtering features email applications give you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Usually, email clients use one of the following two communication protocols to retrieve the emails <\/span>from your server and display them on your device:<\/b><\/p>\n

POP3<\/b><\/h3>\n

POP3 is a communication protocol<\/b> that enables your email client to connect to the server and periodically check for new messages. If a new email has arrived, the application automatically downloads it to your device and alerts you about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

One thing you should know is that with POP3,<\/span> you manage your emails locally.<\/b> For example, if you open a message on your device and then move it into an inbox subfolder, the email won’t be marked as read, and the action won’t be replicated on the server.<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s more, many email clients delete new messages from the server after downloading them to your device.<\/span><\/p>\n

What all this means is that POP3 is<\/span> an excellent option if you have limited space on the mail server, <\/b>need to work offline from time to time, and access your email from a single device only.<\/span><\/p>\n

IMAP<\/b><\/h3>\n

For many, IMAP is the preferred protocol for managing their communication through an email client. It too fetches the contents of your inbox and displays them on your device. However, unlike POP3, it has full sync capabilities between your computer or smartphone and the server.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, with IMAP,<\/span> you are effectively managing your email remotely.<\/b> If you mark a message as read on your device, the action is replicated on the server. The same goes for deleting or moving messages. This makes the protocol much more suitable if multiple devices are connected to the same account.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to <\/span>IMAP and POP3<\/b><\/a>, email clients also use <\/span>SMTP<\/b>. Short for <\/span>Simple Mail Transfer Protocol<\/b>, SMTP has been the standard for email transmission for ages. Pretty much every email service in the world uses SMTP, and without it, your email application would be unable to send your messages across.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that we know how email clients work, it’s time to learn what you need to bear in mind while setting them up.<\/span><\/p>\n

How to set up my email address through an email client application<\/b><\/h2>\n


\n<\/span>There are hundreds of different email clients. Some are free, others are paid, and quite a few of them <\/span>come pre-installed with your operating system.<\/b> The range of features you get differs from application to application, and so do the exact steps you need to take to set up your email account. Under the hood, however, the mechanism they use is pretty much identical.<\/span><\/p>\n

The email client connects to your mail server and uses the login credentials you’ve provided to prove that it’s authorized to view the contents of your inbox.<\/span> It needs to know which mail server to connect to,<\/b> and this is what confuses most people.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the past, you would need to manually enter the incoming and outgoing mail servers and the networking ports they work with<\/span>. Quite a few people struggled with the task and found it unnecessarily complicated.<\/b>
\n<\/b>
\n<\/span>With time, email clients evolved, and right now, most modern applications can automatically detect the correct mail server based on the email address. As a result, in most cases, connecting to your account via an email application is as simple as providing your address and the password you’ve set in your<\/span> control panel.<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

That said, there are a few things you need to bear in mind to make sure your client is configured correctly:<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n