Post Office Protocol

Hey there kiddo, do you know what a post office is? It's a place where people go to send and receive letters, right?

Well, just like a physical post office, there's also something called Post Office Protocol, or POP for short. It's how your computer (or phone or tablet) talks to the post office of your email provider.

You see, when you sign up for an email account, you have to give your email provider some information like your name, email address, and a password. That password is super important because that's how your email provider knows it's really you when you try to log in.

So, let's say you want to check your email on your computer. You open up your email program, put in your email address and password, and click "log in." Your computer sends a message to the post office of your email provider using POP. It says, "Hey, I'm trying to log in as (your email address). Can you check my password and let me in if it's right?"

The post office checks your password and sees that it matches what they have on file. They send a message back to your computer saying, "Welcome, (your name)! You have (however many) new messages." Then your computer can use POP to download those messages so you can read them.

POP is like a special language that your email program and your email provider's post office use to talk to each other. It's how your computer knows if you have new messages, if you've already read them, if you've deleted them, and all sorts of other things.

So, that's Post Office Protocol in a nutshell. It's like a post office, but for email!