The Vet IT Group hopes to move in this direction. Over the coming year we will be working with users whose email account names differ from their PennNet IDs so that we can be sure that we have unique usernames across campus. Eventually this project will permit us to offer each person a single username and password for all of the electronic resources at the School of Veterinary Medicine. With POP, email is transferred from the email server to your desktop machine. The email can optionally be left on the email server for a period of time.
POP is ideal for users check their email from a single computer.
POP also downloads the entire email message. If you frequently receive attachments and access your email using a modem, this can slow you down tremendously. With IMAP, email is left on the email server, and your mail program grabs chunks of email to view on an as-needed basis. With IMAP you get greater flexibility in accessing your email from multiple locations since all your email and your email folders are stored on the server and not on any single computer. The downside to using IMAP is that you are responsible for cleaning up the email on the server since there is limited disk space there.