POP3 (Post Office Protocol, version 3) is an Internet standard which defines a mechanism for accessing a mailbox located on a remote host machine. At Manhattan College, POP03 mail services are available to students, faculty, and staff with NetWare email accounts. POP mail services enable e-mail accounts to be accessed from outside the Novell portion of the JasperNet network using a mail client that supports the POP protocol. In order to access mail via POP, you must be directly connected to the JasperNet network, or your Internet Service Provider must support the POP protocol.

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How Does POP work?

In order to use POP3 services, you require a user identity, or account on the host machine; when people send mail to you, they send it to your account on the host, which receives it and stores it in a mailbox for you. The next step is to run a program which supports the POP3 protocol (such as Pegasus Mail or Netscape): the program logs into the remote host on your behalf and copies any unread mail on the host to your local machine for reading. The copy of the mail remaining on the remote host is usually then deleted (although most POP3 mailer clients today make deletion an option).

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