A POP mailbox is an e-mail address that receives e-mail messages and stores them on our servers. The messages wait on our servers until you read them using either our Webmail pages or a mail program such as Outlook Express or Eudora on your own computer.
POP mailboxes are the way most people read their e-mail.
It's useful to compare POP mailboxes to the other type of e-mail address, a forwarding address. When a forwarding address receives an e-mail message, it forwards the message to another address that you've specified, without leaving a copy of the message on our servers. You'd read the messages using whatever method you use to read e-mail sent to the other address.
If you're not sure whether you need a POP mailbox or a forwarding address, see Choosing a POP Mailbox or a Forwarding Alias for help.
You'll probably want to create a POP mailbox for each person who reads e-mail. For example, if three people named Rob, Mollie and Charlotte each need an e-mail address, you might want to create POP mailboxes for rob@example.com, mollie@example.com and charlotte@example.com.
To learn how to create a POP mailbox, see the topic Creating POP Mailboxes.
Some people create POP mailboxes for generic "role" addresses, such as sales@example.com and support@example.com. That works as long as you use Webmail, or if only one person is reading the mailbox, but it can cause problems if two or more people are reading the same mailbox using mail programs on their own computer.
The reason is that as each person reads the incoming mail, his or her mail program will remove it from the server. That prevents the second person from seeing the messages the first person viewed.
To avoid this problem, be sure to set each of the mail programs to leave a copy of the messages on the server for several days so that all the mail programs have a chance to see it.