In VPOP3 a Connection tells VPOP3 how to 'connect' to the Internet.

VPOP3 supports up to 10 Connections, which can be either network connections or Dial-Up connections (using a modem)

A Connection is linked to one Mail Sender and zero or more Mail Collectors.

A Connection is 'fired' by either a Schedule or manually from the status monitor or Status page in the settings.

So, when a Schedule tells VPOP3 to start a Connection, VPOP3 will start sending through the associated Mail Sender, and start collecting through the associated Mail Collectors.

In most cases nowadays, a VPOP3 installation will have a single Connection which is set to Use network for Connection. This is the case when VPOP3 connects via a router or firewall.

In some situations it may help to create multiple Connections. Some examples of when this would be useful are:

• When you need to send different mail through different external relay servers
• When you want to have a complex schedule where different Mail Collectors are used at different frequencies
• If you want to have a fallback method - eg connect through a router normally, but fall back to a dial-up modem (note: if your router does the fallback to dial-up then this isn't necessary)

The Connection Name can contain any text. This is a name which is used in error reporting and status updates, so it can be useful to use something such as ISP name, especially if you have multiple Connections defined

• Use network for Connection. In this case, VPOP3 assumes the connection is always available, and doesn't do anything to 'connect', it just tries to access the remote servers over the network. Nowadays, most people have routers, so this is the most common setting to use.
• Use Dial-up for connection. In this case, VPOP3 will control a modem to connect to and disconnect from the Internet. Only use this option if VPOP3 should be in total control of the modem. If you are wanting to share the modem amongst other devices/software, then you should probably use a proxy server or router to control the modem.

In the Connector Schedule settings, you can easily tell VPOP3 to connect using the Default connections at specified times. You can designate one or more Connections as 'Default' connections, in which case they will be triggered one after the other when a Default connection is scheduled.

This allows you to easily enable/disable Connections from the Connector Schedule without having to edit the Schedule to change the specified Connections to use.