Summary    

A POP account is an email address with a mailbox where your mail actually sits and waits for you to get it. An alias is an email address that routes the email to your POP account.

DISCUSSION

What is the difference between an alias and a POP email account?
Here's an analogy: A POP email account is like your postal mailbox at your house or your PO Box at the Post Office. You use an email program to retrieve the email for the account, just like you go to the end of the driveway or to the Post office to your mailbox to retrieve your postal mail.

An alias, on the other hand, is like a mail forwarding address which forwards to a mailbox somewhere that you specify. An alias forwards your email to a POP account as a mail forwarding address forwards your mail from one postal mail address to another (yes, you can have an alias to an alias as long as it winds up somewhere retrievable.

Restated, a POP account is the final destination of email, whereas an alias forwards or re-routes your email to that final destination.

The reason you would want to use an alias is for your convenience. That could mean to have for professional look or perhaps to note the source of an email inquiry for marketing reasons. If you have on your web site, info@mycoolproduct.com and you get an email to that address you know its origin without setting up an entirly new POP account on your computer.

An alias is the easiest to setup and integrate into your existing world. If you already have an email account that you check somewhere (a POP account no doubt), the alias can be configured to send your email to that existing account. Nothing special need be done in your email software.

When creating a POP account, you must then configure your email program to retrieve the messages, or check your mail at the server with a web mail program, such as the one that comes with your hosting found at http://webmail.yourdomain.com.   It makes sense to have at least one (maybe a half dozen) POP accounts, whereas you could have dozens of alias.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It is a protocol that mail programs use to download mail from a POP mail server. The POP mail server receives your e-mail when you are not connected to the Internet. Your mail is stored on the server once you connect to the server through your e-mail client. The e-mail client then sends a request to the POP mail server, and your e-mail is transferred from the server to your computer.

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