Many organizations rely on the POP3 protocol to retrieve their email, and SMTP to send it. The POP3 protocol, despite its popularity, has the following drawbacks:

• Passwords and email contents are transmitted in plain text across the network. If the email server is provided by your ISP, your passwords and confidential documents may travel across the Internet. While it is possible to fetch messages using POP3 over a secure tunnel, this is not widely supported.
• Emails, once downloaded, are stored on individual desktops. This is good from a privacy point of view, but not so good if your organization would like to conduct regular backups.

An alternative to POP3 for downloading email is IMAP. IMAP provides the following advantages:

• No need to download and sort mail both at home and at work - do it once and see the same folders from wherever you want.
• Read office emails using the web.
• Easier to do backups.

Transparen can help your organization move email services to IMAP, without losing emails. Using our server, we can also help your organizations use secure tunnels to retrieve emails. Our method has the following advantages:

• Less hassle for multi-homed laptops.
• More secure because passwords and emails are encrypted before being sent across the Internet.
• Faster and more responsive.