What does POP3 server mean?

Find my POP server's address

• I recently took over a server (Ubuntu 9) that is set up to send and receive email and uses RoundCube as its webmail interface. The folks who use the machine don't like RoundCube and want to do everything on their personal gmail accounts. Since RoundCube doesn't support email forwarding (as far as I can tell), I thought that the easiest way would be to download the emails to their gmail accounts via POP3. I don't know very much about POP3. If the server can send and receive email, does that mean that it probably is able to respond to POP3 requests, or would I need to install something else to do that? Assuming that my machine has enough to respond to the requests, how do I find out the address where it's serving POP requests? I couldn't find anything in the apache settings, and http://www.exclamationsoft.com/exclamationsoft/netmailbot/help/reference/find_mail_server.asp doesn't get me a working address.

• Answer:

  An email server uses SMTP to send messages and other email services connect to it using SMTP as well. POP3 is only needed if you want to allow people to connect and download the email using a client. So it is possible (but I think unlikely) that a POP3 service is not installed. A common service is Dovecot, you can look to see if you have it installed. That said, generally the service is set to respond to port 110. It probably doesn't have a different IP just for POP3 access. You can check your firewall to make sure it allows connections over tcp port 110. To find your ip address you can use ifconfig or even see this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=526176