Compare and contrast email and IM?

Answer 1

IM (Instant Messaging) is an online chat capability between two known parties who are both logged in to the IM facility and send real time messages to each other. There are multiple IM programs and protocols that are not compatible with each other although some IM programs have extensions that allow communicating with other protocols. There are some IM standard protocols but none are universally excepted.

email has been around much longer than IM and there is a single standard email protocol (SMTP -Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) that is used for routing mail messages between mail servers. Mail servers are machines and software that receive your email, locate the destination server and route the message to it. If the server is not available for some reason, mail will be held for a while (maybe a few days) until the server is available. Once it arrives at the destination server it will be held until retrieved by your computer email program. The mail servers are not the program used on your computer for email.

Email is sent and received with an email program such as Microsoft mail (or outlook or live mail), Mozilla Thunderbird, Pegasus Mail, Eudora, Opera mail or a web based mail programs such as gmail, Yahoo Mail, Aol, Mail, etc. The stand alone mail programs will usually use SMTP to send an email to a mail server and can use either POP3, or IMAP (or MAPI) to retrieve emails from a mail server. There are many email programs and they can all send and receive emails from each other because they all follow the standard email protocols.

Email is not done real time, although it looks like email messages arrive at their destination almost immediately, and you do not need to be running an email program (or have the computer turned on) for an email to be sent and received. The email is stored at the email server until retrieved by your email program and depending on how you retrieve the email message it may be kept there until you intentionally delete it.