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If you’ve ever set up email software to retrieve your email, you’ll know that there are some weird sounding settings you have to give the software. For most you have to give the POP and SMTP settings while for some others you need to know your IMAP server settings. Maybe knowing what these acronyms stand for will make the whole email setup thing a little less overwhelming. We’ll start this week with POP.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol. When someone sends you a postcard in the mail, it doesn’t leave the mailbox and go straight to your door. It goes to a post office and someone sorts it and sends it onto your address, possibly even in a timely manner. Very simply put, this is what your Post Office Protocol server does. In tech-world, a protocol is a set of rules for communicating. A POP server uses Post Office Protocol like the person at your post office who gives you the package that was sent to you, but only after he makes sure you are who you are. It’s the rules for how your ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) mail server communicates with your email software.

First, your email program goes to the POP server, makes a connection, then provides the username and password you’ve typed in. If the username and password are correct, your software ask “any mail for someone@somewhere.com”? And the server uses POP to first let your email client know there is email, then how many email there are, and what size they are. It then retrieves your emails so you can read them and, depending on the settings you’ve given it, deletes them from the server or keeps them on the server.

So, the POP server setting your email software asks for when you first set it up, is just the address your email software can use to start these communications. It’s, again very simply put, the address of the post office where you’ll pick up your mail. Your Internet Service Provider (the people you pay every month for your Internet) should provide you with the email address, password, and POP settings you need but if you’ve lost the POP settings and need them, you can usually Google your ISP’s name and POP settings to find what you need to know.