I have been working with a small internet
provider for years and all of a sudden I can't get my email. When I try to
retrieve the email, I see an error that says that POP (Post Office Protocol) is
no longer supported. I use Outlook. What's going on? How do I solve this
problem?
It is very frustrating when you
can’t receive your email, especially when it was working fine previously. It’s
almost certain that Outlook is not the culprit here; instead, the problem is
that your service provider has changed their email handling and you haven’t
modified your settings to accommodate their changes.
A little background first: in the
world of email, there are two “popular” incoming protocols for communications
between email clients (like Outlook) and email servers (at your ISP). The
older, simpler, more limited protocol is POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3); the
newer, more versatile, more secure protocol is IMAP (Internet Message Access
Protocol). IMAP provides many features that make working and living with email
better and simpler (our favorite is that IMAP supports synchronization between
client applications and the email server, making it possible for you to have
the same inbox and see the same emails on multiple devices, such as your
desktop and your phone). If at all possible, you should choose IMAP for your
email protocol, and you do have this choice if your ISP supports it. With
either incoming protocol, you use a protocol called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol) for sending.
When you configured your email
settings in Outlook, you selected the POP3 protocol for receiving email, and at
the time you set it up, it worked fine. It’s possible that your ISP decided to
deprecate support for POP3, leaving you without any way to receive your
incoming email. This is an easy problem to fix: You simply need to find the
ISP’s IMAP protocol settings (generally, a server name like imap.google.com,
for Gmail) along with optional settings for security. All modern ISP’s support
IMAP, and every modern email client application supports it, as well.
To find your ISP’s IMAP settings,
search for “<your ISP> IMAP settings” (for example “Gmail IMAP settings”
or “Yahoo IMAP settings”). You’ll find the information you need to set up
incoming email in your email client. To get exact instructions, add the name of
your email client to the search string (“Outlook Gmail IMAP settings”)—that
way, you’ll find instructions that show you exactly what to do!
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