Okay, so I have my email hosted on a server that I rent space on and at the moment I'm accessing it by POP. But my phone accesses the same email by IMAP. What's the difference, which is better and can I make them the same?

Is it fair to hope that by making them both the same that I can then properly synchronise my phone and laptop email?

Thank you.

AFAIK POP just retrieves your mail – IMAP synchronises it.

so with imap your sent mail will appear in the sent folder of all your devices, send a pic from your pc at home, find it on your laptop or iphone when you're out n about. also a read mail will show up as read on everything. pretty smart compared to pop. takes up a bunch of space somewhere tho… in a cloud