Confused about SMTP and POP3

[GDX]

I was recently reading thi s article and they talked about making POP3 faster for recieveing inbound mail, I always thought thta was the job of the SMTP server, and POP3 was used for authentication and downloading email from your mailbox Can someone please explain to me what each service is used for? Gordon R. Durgha
gd@vslink.net

http://www.vslink.net

http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=1217371

 

[Guest_imported]

SMTP is a protocol to send and receive messages from server to server or client to server. The messages that are stores in your mailbox ( in server ) can be read with many protocols. POP3 is one of them. It is use with internet mail servers because they download your messages from the server mailbox to your PC.