It's had a good run but time is running out on POP. Legacy POP e-mail (Post Office Protocol) services where Outlook downloads mail are being replaced by automatically synchronizing, secure, reliable, and feature rich Office 365 hosted Exchange email. Instant synchronization of messages, calendar entries, contacts and tasks between all devices has become the standard. Users need everything on their desktop Outlook to be mirrored on mobile devices, laptops, and on webmail. Responding to an issue when away from the office is seamless. Everything that’s on your desktop is on your phone. You have client’s phone numbers, email address, and your calendar to remotely respond and schedule appointments.
POP mail accounts configured to transmit passwords in “plain text” are vulnerable to hackers sniffing out passwords. Conversely, Office 365 email is authenticated via secured and encrypted channels. All mail, calendar and contact data is encrypted during transmission and while at rest on cloud servers.
Calendar, contact, mailbox sharing is not integral to POP mail. Office 365 lets organizations easily share calendars, contacts and entire mailboxes as needed. Users leverage access to company calendars for HR purposes, and business groups and quickly access company contact lists and review email sent to shared mailboxes such as AccountsPayable@, Receivable@, contact@, info@ or the mailbox of former employees or those on vacation.
Duplicate emails are common on POP accounts where Outlook profiles become corrupt and lose track of what has been downloaded and what has not. Office 365 never has that issue.
SPAM and Virus filtering are included in Office 365 for both inbound and outbound mail. Safe lists can be easily configured to assure the mail for known senders is never blocked.
Office 365 Essentials includes Office Online Web Applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and PowerPoint. Wherever you have access to the Internet you can utilize the suite of online applications to get your work done.
Office 365 includes 50 GB’s of mailbox storage plus 1TB of OneDrive for Business storage. It’s 99.9% uptime reliability is unsurpassed. Office 365 is a security-hardened service using the defense-in-depth approach to provide physical, logical, and data layers of security features and operational best practices.
The benefits are clear and the good news is that Office 365 only costs $5 per month per mailbox.