October 15, 2019

Why Do You Need Both SMTP And IMAP For Effective Email Marketing

With the increased digitization in the modern world, the use of emails has also increased manifold. Due to the increased usage of emails these days, business owners prefer email marketing to garner leads and secure more customers.

But with bulk email sending, there are often some delays or network glitches that can be costly for a business. Delayed or missing emails can lead to business loss, productivity loss, and delay in services.

So it is imperative for business owners to ensure that their marketing emails reach the destination on time. SMTP and IMAP, two email protocols, can help keep your mailing services up and running at all times.

What are SMTP and IMAP?

SMTP– Also known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, this setting basically secures the message and ensure that it is authenticated correctly before it gets delivered to the recipient’s mailbox.

IMAP– Internet Message Access Protocol is another important aspect of delivering emails to the concerned mailbox from the transitional server.

How are they different?

The concept of SMTP and IMAP might sound similar, but they work quite differently.

SMTP IMAP
  • With SMTP, you would send, reply and forward mails from an email client like Outlook to a server that would receive mails. Being a sender, you would use an SMTP server in order to carry out the process of transmitting email messages. The key thing to remember is that SMTP is all about sending emails.
  • SMTP makes use of port 25
  • When it comes to IMAP, it is all about managing as well as retrieving emails from the receiving server. It helps in synchronizing messages across all devices. In other words, IMAP is all about receiving emails.
  • IMAP normally uses the port 143.

email, email marketing, newsletter

How do these two protocols work together?

Whether you are sending a password reset request or you are receiving a transactional OTP, you might be using both the protocols together, without even realizing that. Their flow of work is as follows:

  • After you have composed an email, you press the send button. Your email client would then use SMTP to send emails from your client to the recipient’s email server.
  • On receiving the message from SMTP, the recipient’s mail client would fetch it using IMAP and would place the same on their mailbox for them to access.
  • The process, although it seems to be quite simple, follows a complex algorithm. Problems in any of the steps would lead to the message getting delayed or even undelivered.

Conclusion

You will find that there are several ways of sending and receiving emails, but the most effective is using SMTP and IMAP together. These protocols are the most effective ones, with which we can send and receive emails seamlessly in no time, without even worrying about the volume of emails.

Your service provider would help you to set up IMAP and SMTP. Regardless of the size of your business, you cannot afford to skip these two aspects of email.

 

About the author 

Imran Uddin


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