First and foremost I think it is important for people to understand what POP email really is. These are the email accounts you get for free with your internet provider or included in your website hosting plan. POP email accounts only handle your email and are not a graceful solution for business people or mobile professionals. I can remember the days of using Outlook with my pop account to check email. Life was a disorganized world of limited access. Many or you like me have been using Outlook to store critical data in for years. The problem was I could only access my Outlook data from one computer because I had a pop account. I would work all day at the office and sort/organize my emails into folders, add/update my contacts, schedule appointments and the like. Then I would go home and open Outlook on my home pc only to have to download all the messages I already looked at through the day. To make things more insane all my outlook data (sent items, email folders, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes) was different than on my office pc. Working with different outlook data on different PC’s was a nightmare and a time vacuum.

Now Microsoft Exchange enters the world and it is so easy and makes so much sense people are not only asking for it by name they are even willing to pay for an email account (and it’s worth the money) – man how times have changed!  So what does Microsoft Exchange do that is so revolutionary?  I will try to explain this is non-technical terms so that everyone can be enlightened instead of just the techie people. Microsoft Exchange was designed from the ground up to work with Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is the email and communication program in the Microsoft Office Suite. With an exchange server every person in your company has their own mailbox. All the employees’ mailboxes are stored under your company domain name like abc.com for security purposes. On an exchange server your Outlook has a copy of all your data on the pc you are using but Outlook also mirrors that data in real-time to the Microsoft exchange server. Now since everyone’s Outlook data is stored on the exchange server and in outlook then now everyone has the ability to share their outlook data with co-workers as well as access all of their outlook data from any computer connected to the internet.

Now take that same scenario of me working from 2 pc’s one at the office and one at home but now using Exchange with Outlook. As I sit in the office all day managing emails, storing them in folders, updating contacts and appointments Outlook is sending those changes to the exchange server in real time. I can now at the end of the day shut down my office computer and head home. Now I open Outlook on my home pc and the first thing Outlook does is look at my mailbox on the exchange server to see what has changed since the last time it logged on. Then within minutes I am looking at all the same data in outlook as was on my office pc – all the folders are identical email, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes. 

So in essence POP accounts manage email in a very limited fashion (I guess you really do get what you pay for) while Exchange stores all your Outlook data securely on the internet so it can be synchronized with Outlook on multiple computers and PDA phones in real time. Exchange also opens up the ability for you and your co-workers to share and manipulate each other’s Outlook data like calendars, contacts, tasks, notes and email.

If you are still working in the world of POP email you should explore some hosted exchange providers like us – Link2Exchange. 

Many hosted providers like us have 30 day free trials so what have you got to lose?