I am not going to give the definitions of these terms as you can find this by searching. What I want to tell you is that what this is and how to use it.
Many people don't realize the bandwidth cost just by opening their mail accounts. These days the modern mail interfaces are hogged with features and hence they consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. Prime examples are the new Y!mail interface and Gmail interface both of which cost around 2MB just to login. For people who are on restricted plans, this can come to a significant amount at the end of the month. Many people are still not aware of the free POP and IMAP services provided by Yahoo! and Google.
What this lets you do is basically the mails can be downloaded onto your computer and sent from your computer without even opening the browser, using applications like Outlook or Thunderbird. Its very easy to configure the email clients to be used with your free mail accounts. This has more benefits, all the mail then resides in your HDD, so next time you want to read them, no need to connect to the internet. You can also backup the mails from your HDD.
Two popular email clients are Thunderbird, which is free and open source and Outlook Express which comes with Windows XP. To configure these clients all you need to do is search using you email client name and mail a/c you are using. For example "Configure Thunderbird for Gmail" and you'll get detailed instructions. Try it!