A Mail Collector is how you tell VPOP3 to collect incoming mail.
Each Mail Collector is associated with one or more Connections. The VPOP3 Connector Schedule determines when each Connection is run.
Each Mail Collector has a General tab. The settings on this tab determine which other tabs are available.
The Mail Collector Name is a name you assign to a collector for your reference. This can be anything you want, but it is best to make it something useful, such as the ISP name, or ISP+account name or something. Error reports will refer to this name.
This option tells VPOP3 how to collect mail. There are three methods that VPOP3 can use to get incoming mail:
The Incoming SMTP collection method is only needed if VPOP3 has to “do something” to trigger incoming SMTP mail. If you have a permanent Internet connection with MX records pointing at the VPOP3 server, then usually you do not need to create an Incoming SMTP collector, as it will “just work”.
This checkbox lets you enable this Mail Collector. If the checkbox is cleared, then the Collector will not be used. This can be useful for temporarily disabling mail collection from specific ISP accounts.
The Priority sets the order of processing of Mail Collectors. Lower numbers are processed first. The order of Mail Collectors with the same priority number is indeterminate.
This setting can be useful if you have a lot of Collectors and you want the time of collection from some Collectors to be more determinable than for other Collectors. Note that VPOP3 will only download from one POP3 Collector at once, so changing the priority will not affect how frequently mail is collected at all, but just make some be processed sooner in the cycle than others.
If you have, say, 10 Collectors which each take 1 minute and are scheduled every 10 minutes, each with the priorities 1-10, then the 'priority 1' Collector will be processed at, say, 10:00, 10:10, 10:20 etc. The 'priority 5' Collector will be processed at 10:04, 10:14, 10:24 etc. So, they will still be processed every 10 minutes, just at different points in the cycle.
If you want to alter how frequently different Collectors collect mail, then you can associate them with different Connections and define different Schedules for the different Connections.
This section lets you select which Connections this Mail Collector is used with. In turn, this determines at which Scheduled times the Collector will be used.