POP

Post Office Protocol

RFC 1939

"Intended to permit a workstation to dynamically access a maildrop on a server host in a useful fashion."

So simple you can go get your mail yourself by writing a small script or just using Telnet. Used basically for downloading messages from the server and deleting them; IMAP offers much more.

POP3 servers generally listen on port 110.

Commands and Replies

Commands

• USER name

• PASS string

• QUIT

• STAT

• LIST [messageNumber]

• RETR messageNumber

• DELE messageNumber

• NOOP

• RSET

• APOP

• TOP messageNumber n

• UIDL [messageNumber]

Reply Codes

All replies have one of two formats:

• +OK text

• -ERR text

Example Sessions