What You Need to Know About POP and IMAP Email Settings Find out the differences between the two, the security risks of each and more.

Q: What's the difference between POP and IMAP email settings, and which will work best for my business?

A: There's only one person who can start off a conversation about email protocols by saying, "When I invented email back in 1978 …," and that person is V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds multiple degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a doctorate in computational systems biology. As a high school student, he developed an electronic version of a mail system for interoffice use and copyrighted his program as "Email."

Ayyadurai, founder and president of EchoMail in Cambridge, Mass., sat down with us to explain the differences between Post Office Protocol and Internet Message Access Protocol.