Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) are the mainstream protocols that most e-mail services use currently. Both have fairly significant differences. Why does it matter how your client is set up? See, you can setup, say, your smartphone's e-mail application to either use POP or IMAP.
IMAP almost always stores the inbox itself (consisting of all emails received) on the central e-mail server. One benefit of this service is that all mail is backed up frequently. In the case that there is some kind of large-scale crash, your data is preserved in more than one server location. Once the outage has been fixed, then the e-mail attached to your account will return to your regular inbox as per usual operation. IMAP employs the use of ciphers, specifically for MD5 and SHA hashes for connections between client and server. If a match fails authentication, then a user must intervene to provide some form of confirmation or risk the connection itself being severed and labeled as suspect. A possible issue affecting this security process is that of a rough connection. Perhaps some packets are lost in transit, thereby weakening the security on one end, which would make authentication that much more complicated.
POP works fairly differently than IMAP. E-mail is stored initially on a server and later saved relatively permanently on the computer being used. However, as a result, the messages will almost always no longer be stored on the server indefinitely unless configured in a special way. So there will be no way to resurrect lost data unless the user has been keeping track. POP uses specific commands with shared secrets for security. Secrets can cause accessing private data to become more complex.
Security-wise
* http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501
* http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321
* http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1939
Joshua, the post is very cool. I really like your blog about Internet Message Access Protocol and Post Office Protocol. I totally agree that IMAP and POP are widely use nowadays. You explained well on how they work in email. The way they work can really help to users who want to protect their important information in many aspects of communication, especially in email. Cryptography (all securities protocol like IMAP and POP) is required for all transferring information in the internet currently. However, nothing is perfect and hacker may find a way to get through this protection sooner or later. So, the most important is how users know the potential of being attacked. Then they should be more careful when sharing their information out.
ReplyDeleteIn short, this is a very informative post. Keep doing this good stuff, Joshua.