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POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve messages from a remote e-mail server.

As well as being supported by local e-mail clients POP3 is also supported by most webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.

POP3 is just one communications protocol on the web. Others include:

  • Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
  • User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
  • Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)
  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
  • File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
  • Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)

POP3 on Wikipedia