You've got a PalmPilot and you want to keep in touch with all of your laptop-lugging colleagues. What are your email options? Can you get your email on your PalmPilot directly, or do you need to HotSync? What are SMTP and POP3 anyway? This article is an introduction to using email on your PalmPilot.

Standards explained
Starting with the introduction of the PalmPilot Professional, 3Com included a TCP/IP stack in the operating system. This enabled the PalmPilot to connect to the Internet, and opened up the world of standards-based email to many PalmPilot users.

Internet-based email revolves around three standards: Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), Post Office Protocol (POP3), and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP4). In very simple terms, SMTP can be equated to the post office in your town that delivers the mail to everyone's mailbox, while POP and IMAP take the place of the mailbox at your house.

POP3 has been around for nearly twenty years, and is a reliable email client. IMAP4 is a more recent standard that addresses some of the things that POP3 lacks when compared to proprietary email systems. IMAP4 may not be used as widely as POP3, but it offers a number of handy features. While POP3 is intended mainly to move email from the SMTP server to your local machine, IMAP4 offers you more tools to manipulate your mailbox on the server. For example, you can view an email's header and then decide whether to download it. You can also create and manipulate folders or mailboxes on the server, delete messages, or search for certain parts of a note.

For all the details about these standards, visit the Information Sciences Institute RFC page at http://www.rfc-editor.org/isi.html and read the appropriate Requests for Comment (RFCs). A short list includes RFC 821, which discusses SMTP; RFC 1939, which covers POP3; and RFC 2060, which details IMAP4.