Possible Issues Using Clean Email with a POP3-Enabled Email Account
📌 Note: We have not designed Clean Email to work with the POP3 protocol. If your email server does not support the IMAP protocol, Clean Email will not work.
Summary
If your email app or software uses the POP3 protocol to access your email account, you may see discrepancies between the messages on your local devices and what you see in Clean Email. You may be able to prevent this by configuring your email app or software to use the IMAP protocol instead.
More Information
Email clients can be set up to access your email provider’s server in two ways: using the POP3 protocol or using the IMAP protocol. Both protocols serve the same purpose, but they work differently.
Essentially, POP3 is a protocol that downloads messages from a server locally on the device (phone/laptop), while IMAP directly shows the messages that are on the server.
If your email app or software uses the POP3 protocol to access your email, that actually downloads messages locally to your phone or computer, where Clean Email cannot reach them. However, if your email app or software uses the IMAP protocol, that shows the messages as they are on the server, so any changes made by Clean Email will be reflected on your device as well.
Therefore, if you set up your local apps or software to use the IMAP protocol to access your email, you will always see the same messages on all of your devices and will not have copies of the messages downloaded locally. All changes Clean Email makes on your email account will be reflected in all of your devices.
On the other hand, if you set up your local apps or software to use POP3, messages from the server will be downloaded locally on your device, sometimes even before Clean Email has a chance to clean them from the server. Since Clean Email can not access your devices, it can not clean those messages.
For assistance in configuring your email apps or software to use the IMAP protocol rather than POP3, please contact your email provider directly.
Please contact us and we will be happy to help.
