Welcome back to the Getting Started to Gmail series.

You know that you can send and receive email using Gmail but if you use another service to check your email such as Outlook, Windows or Thunderbird. Then you may want to consider configuring your Gmail account for POP or IMAP access. First let me explain what POP means.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol and it set out it allows you to download your messages from your Gmail account and the Gmail servers onto your own computer so you can read them in another mail program you may use such as Outlook. In order to set up POP mail in Gmail you need to choose enable it for all mail past and present or only future messages. You can also choose to keep messages access to POP in your Gmail inbox, achieve in Gmail or deleted in Gmail. This does not affect the way your messages are stored in the email program you choose to use.

You then need to follow the instructions on how to configure your email program that you're currently using. With that said the recommended method for viewing you Gmail messages with another program is called IMAP. IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and it allows you to access your messages using another email program but also allows everything you do when log into Gmail through the web to be received by your other email programs.

Again, you need to have IMAP enabled and then follow the instructions to configure it for the email program that you currently use. Remember there are ten parts to these series so don’t forget to check out the other parts in the Getting Started to Gmail series.