How to set up email in your computer or phone app. IMAP or POP3?

Dearest and dearest email readers and writers,
Let's see together how to set up a program for managing your email on your desktop, laptop or mobile devices.

Important premise: our assistance is limited to the functioning of email via webmail.
This is because there can be various email programs or apps and their development and operation does not depend on us.

In this article we will offer the basic information you need to set up your own email.

Let's start with the absolutely most frequent request: how to set up your own mailbox on an APPLE device (mobile or not).

Apple devices in most cases do not give the possibility to set up email "manually" and therefore an automatic procedure has been created for them.
You will need to download a file from the webmail screen onto your device, click it and let the automatic procedure continue.

1. Connect to your webmail via the appropriate address, for example
https://webmail.sitifattibene.it
You will find yourself on the webmail management page.
ATTENTION: after logging in you may be redirected directly to roundcube (where you can click on your messages). In this case, locate the "Webmail Home" button to take you to the webmail management screen.

2. Go to the bottom of the page and click “Configure Mail Client”

3. Clicca “IMAP over SSL/TLS” in corrispondenza di “iOS for iOS for iPhone/iPad/iPod and MacOS® Mail.app®”.

4. Finally click “Proceed” and follow the instructions you will receive on the screen of your device.

How to set up the mail app on any other device

Fortunately, in general all other devices follow the same procedure.
Whether it is Thunderbird, K7Mail, Outlook or other, in general it will be sufficient to use the automatic procedure offered by the program to set up your email, remembering that:

• the username is always the mailbox (info@lamiacasella.com)
• the password is always the mailbox password

In some cases the automatic procedure does not work and it will be necessary to enter the mail parameters manually.

If the email was info@ilmiosito.com, the parameters will be:

IMAP or POP3?

Generally mail programs use IMAP (Internet message access protocol) as the default setting, POP3 (Post office protocol) mail and you don't need to worry about it, but it is good to know the difference in case you need to reset an email program because, for example, you have changed web hosting and on our device the mail was set up with POP3.

Let's say that until yesterday you were on bananahosting and you had info@ilmiosito.com set on your phone or PC with POP3 protocol and today instead your domain is set to work on Easy Green Hosting: the mail program does not download and/or send plus mail because the mail server address (which is now mail.ilmiosito.com) has changed.

In this situation there will be 3 possible cases:

1. the program settings will be the same as before and everything will continue to work as if nothing had happened;
2. you will be able to change the parameters of your email program (the incoming and/or outgoing server addresses and maybe even the password) so that it continues to work;
3. you will not be able to change the settings and you will have to delete the box set on your program to reset it from scratch.

If your email program used the POP3 protocol (case 3), then you should know that the messages stored up until then are only present in your email program and not in the server: by deleting the mailbox you will also delete the messages.

Why? What is the difference between IMAP and POP3?

• IMAP (undoubtedly more practical system), does not process messages only on your device, but in parallel with the mail server: when we write, send, delete etc. a message it is as if we did it from webmail. So using IMAP the messages read, sent and deleted will be the same whether they are read by any other program (which uses IMAP) or whether you use webmail.
• POP3 downloads mail from the inbox folder and then works only locally, on the mail program.
  After downloading new messages, the mail program that works with the POP3 protocol will have no further interaction with the mail server.
  The emails you send will not be saved on the mail server, but only on your device.
  Emails deleted from the inbox* or any other folder will be deleted only on the device and not on the mail server. And the same will be true for moving messages between boxes or creating drafts.
  
  *the mail program will tell the server whether, after downloading the messages, the server will have to immediately delete the messages from the inbox (in which case the server will always be empty), or delete them after a number of days or not delete them at all: depending on This setting, which is only present on your device, will allow you to know whether the messages in the inbox folder are left on the mail server or not. To find out if and which messages are present on the mail server you can also simply connect via webmail, if offered by your old hosting.

What does this entail?
That if you delete your email account set up with POP3 from your device, you could also delete forever all the messages you only had on your device.

How to fix it?
In those cases the best thing to do is, if the email program allows it, as in the case of Thunderbird or Outlook, to add the email account with IMAP protocol again without deleting the previous one and then move the messages by copying and pasting from one folder to another, so that all the messages we want to save remain on the server and not just on our device: when we see that the messages are also visible from the webmail of the new server, then we can easily delete the old POP3 account from our device.

That's all for now.
We wish you good settings and above all many nice messages 🙂