What is IMAP Server? How Does it Work?

When you perform some essential and official task, meetings, and other work then that may lead to your emails. 92% of people use business email and manage their business and other assignments but in some conditions, we need to download them for further use.

You can download & save your email for future use like changing a job, saving yourself from checking entire emails and protecting against privacy issues. Anyway, whatever the reason, you can save your email according to your needs. It's quite simple to download emails but major problem is, you can’t access them from other devices & other places until you haven’t your that same device. 

And finally, you can miss your important work as well as lose our business too. So, the best solution is to use the (Internet Message Access Protocol Server) or IMAP server which will help you in this scenario.

What is IMAP Server?

The IMAP Server is a protocol that will help you in accessing your email using any device and from any location in the world. Also, you don’t need to download and keep emails on your computer in real time. Instead of that, you can use and manipulate them from the email service by storing them locally. 

Not only, but also you can check how many emails you have read & how many are still pending. You just need to sync the email client application with the email server and that will make recipients enable to check the emails’ read & unread status. 

How does it Work?

This retrieval email server works as a mediator across both servers the client-server and the email server. The recipients can read out the email using the IMAP server since this work as an incoming email protocol. Let’s get to know the end-to-end delivery process of the emails.

When users create & send emails that go to the SMTP (Simple Message Transfer Protocol) Server, then go to DNS (Domain Name System). After that goes to the Internet and then to the Domain after that emails move ahead to MTA (Message Transfer Agent) server. 

Similarly goes to the Users’ Account & finally, emails proceed to the recipients from the server using IMAP (Internet Message Acces Protocol) & POP server(Post Office Protocol).

How IMAP Server is Useful?

Firstly you need to contact the server using IMAP, simply by signing on to an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or another one. Then the email client will allow you to visit the header of all emails since that is associated with a particular port.

If you are reading the messages using the IMAP server then emails will remain on the server until you will not delete them clearly. This server lets you read messages only if you want to read or check the attachments then you have to download them locally

The Internet Message Access Protocol server performs only on port number 143. Although the IMAP server is assigned port number 993 by SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security).