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What is the difference between POP3 and IMAP mailboxes?
A mailbox is the place where emails are stored. Every user on your account has a mailbox which can receive mail sent to user@example.com (where example.com is your domain). This means that employees in a company or family members can have separate mailboxes.
You can also set up aliases for mailboxes, so the user 'john' could have the alias of 'support' and receive mail sent to both john@example.com and support@example.com in his mailbox.
You can connect to a mailbox using POP3 or IMAP.
POP3 is the most commonly used email protocol. When using a POP3 mailbox, the messages are downloaded and stored on your computer.
IMAP stores your mail folders (inbox, sent items, etc) on the server. Because IMAP stores all your email folders on the mail server, you can view them from any location (home, office, etc). Mail being stored on your account does count towards your disk space quota.
Webmail uses IMAP to connect to the mailbox. If your email client connects using POP3, you can still use webmail to view new messages in the inbox (you won't be able to see the messages in any other folders which are stored on your computer). However, you will only be able to see the messages whilst your normal email client is off and not downloading mail. This is fine if you are away from your computer.
If you wish to be able to see new messages in the webmail inbox whilst also downloading the mail to your computer, you can set your email client to leave a copy of messages on the server for a number of days, but this doesn't give you the synchrony that IMAP offers.