A few people have recently asked what the difference is between a POP3 mail account and an IMAP account. I knew how to explain it using technical terms like “protocols” and “mail clients”, but most people’s eyes glaze over when I break out the geek-speak, so let’s give this a go in regular old English.

What is POP3?

With POP3, when somebody sends you an email, it gets saved on Enertiahost’s server until you check your mail with Outlook (or whatever mail program you use…they all pretty much do the same thing). When Outlook says “hello” to our server, all your mail is transferred to your computer and deleted from the server. There’s an exception to that rule, which I’ll explain in a minute*, but in a nutshell this is how POP3 works.

What is IMAP?

With IMAP, your email gets stored on the Enertiahost mail server. Outlook simply acts as a viewer/editor. You can reply, forward, etc., but none of that is happening on your laptop. It’s all happening on the mail server

When you create folders or mailboxes with IMAP, they are created on the server. You simply see a copy or an “image” of them on your computer.

Benefits of POP3

Once your mail is downloaded to your computer, you do not need to actually be connected to the Internet to read your email. This might be handy for somebody who spends a lot of time on airplanes. Because your mail is stored on your computer and not our server, you’ll have no concerns about going over your disk usage quota and incurring additional storage charges.

*Here’s the exception I mentioned ealier…make sure Outlook is set to delete messages from the server after downloading them. This is the default setting, so you probably won’t need to change it. However, if you have it set to leave a copy on the server, your messages will stay there until you use Webmail or an IMAP client to delete them.

Benefits of IMAP

Because your email stays on the server, you can access your mail from multiple locations and/or devices at the same time. This is great if you have a smart phone and a desktop computer, and you want to keep your mail current and available to both.

Also, if your computer crashes you don’t have to worry about losing your archived mail. If you have a reasonably quick internet connection, IMAP is generally faster and more reliable.

If you have a GMail account, you’re already using IMAP. It’s great for users who have computers and a smart phone that they want to keep synced up.

Coming up next, POP3 vs. IMAP (Part 2). I’ll take a look at some of the downsides of both types of accounts, and discuss what you’ll need to do if you want to convert from POP3 to IMAP.

- Iain

WordPress is primarily known as blogging software, but it’s so much more. I know several web designers who employ it as the foundation for nearly 100% of their projects. It’s robust, it’s mature, it’s highly customizable, and best of all it’s free.

Once you’ve completed the installation of WordPress, your first step will be to log in to the dashboard and see what’s there. The first thing you’ll likely want to change is the appearance. While the default theme is fairly attractive, it’s not going to set you apart from the crowd who couldn’t be bothered to change it.

From the menu on the left side of the dashboard, hover your cursor over Appearance, and from the pop-out menu click on Themes.

The page you land on will have the Manage Themes tab selected by default. THis will be important later when you have several themes and you want to change/refresh the look of your site. For now, click on the Install Themes tab. Here you’ll find a variety of check boxes and search fields to narrow down your options. Although it’s not necessary to select any of them, I’d suggest you do, because there are literally thousands of free themes available for WordPress. It’s quite overwhelming.

Once your search returns some results and you find one you like, you can preview it without actually installing it. Eventually you’ll find one that pleases you, and you can go ahead and install it. You may not be able to accomplish this quite yet unless you’re familiar with FTP. Go ahead and give it a try, but if you get stuck don’t worry. Part 4 in this series will cover FTP.

Once you know FTP, you’ll be able to not only install themes, but all sorts of different plug-ins that will help you prevent spammers from leaving comments, optimize your site for Google, etc.

That’s it for this week. See you next week for SEO – Part 4.

-Iain

“Blog” is a generic word that covers pretty much any kind of online journal or diary keeping. It’s a mash-up of the words “Web log”. There are no concrete rules for blogs. They can be any format, any length, can contain pictures or videos, links to other online material, etc. A blog is what you want or need it to be.

Telling people you have a blog is like telling people you have a vehicle…it’s a borderline meaningless term, and needs to be further described in order to be informative. Do you own a red tractor or a yellow cab? If it’s a cab, is it a van or a car? What kind of car? The easiest way to provide a description is to provide a link to your blog.

In the case of Enertiahost, our blog (this blog) is intended to compliment the information we give on our front page. It’s not intended to be our primary content. Your situation may be different, and it might make sense to have the blog front and centre. Perhaps you are a cook and want to give away a recipe once a week. Put it in a blog. Perhaps you’re a sports fan and want to make your opinions about your favourite team public every day. Put them in a blog.

There’s no special knowledge required. If you can navigate the internet and know how to use a word processor, you can blog.

There are many good blogging software packages available. Believe it or not, the best ones are free (open source). My favourite is WordPress. The Enertiahost blog is written in WordPress.  If you’ve never installed it before, it can be a little tricky to get going, but the Enertiahost support team is always available to help. I’d encourage you to give it a try though. What’s the worst that can happen? You make a mistake and it doesn’t work? It already doesn’t work, so you’ve lost nothing and gained some experience. Simply download the software, follow the instructions (they call it “The 5 Minute Install”), and you’ll be ready to go.

Another alternative is to have your blog hosted somewhere other than under your own domain name, and then simply link to it from your existing website. Some companies that provide this service – again for free – are Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. If you’re not comfortable installing software and monkeying around with stuff like that, go with one of these free services. You’ll be up and running in no time. Trust me…it’s easy.

Next post, I’ll be talking about ways to customize your self-hosted WordPress blog and make it do exactly what you need it to do.

-Iain