email - Plesk - Forward mails to gmail or fetch directly with POP3 in gmail?

Question

Apart from creating a few websites and using it for my own domain to receive my mails, I haven't done much with plesk. When setting up the server, a friend helped me and suggested to me back then (3 or 4 years ago) to use the forward functionality provided by plesk to forward all mail to my gmail address. In gmail i just added my mail-address in the "send mail as" list so I can also send my mails from there.

I'm just wondering now if there is any reason why I shouldn't just let gmail directly check my mail-inbox via POP3.

Sorry, I'm really new to all this mail-server stuff, but I would like to get some input from some more experienced users if there are any security concerns with any of those methods or if it doesn't matter at all.

Answer 1

The problem with pop3 is that you download all mails from your mail-server itself. So the mails were retrieve and were downloaded from the server at the time. This can be a problem if you use a mail-client and store all mails there. In this case you're not able to retrieve your mails at the webmail for example, because the mails are stored in the client.

I would recommend to use IMAP so you can check your mails from the plesk-server at your mobile-phone, mail-client or webmail.