Simple Mail Access Protocol

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The Simple Mail Access Protocol (SMAP)[1] is an application layer Internet protocol for accessing email stored on a server. It was introduced as part of the Courier suite, with the goal of creating a simpler and more capable alternative to IMAP. (As of 2005), SMAP is still considered experimental, and is only supported by the Courier server and Cone client.

Features

  • MIME attachments can be transmitted in their raw, decoded form. This allows large base64-encoded attachments to be transmitted without the 4:3 inflation that base64 encoding usually incurs.[2]
  • Support for sending outgoing e-mails through the SMAP connection, instead of using a separate SMTP connection to the server. An outgoing message only needs to be transmitted once to both send it and save a copy to a server-side folder.
  • Unicode folder names, with native support for hierarchy.
  • SMAP clients and servers can fall back to IMAP if the peer does not support SMAP.

See also

  • POP4, another attempt at creating a "simpler IMAP", by extending POP3

References

  1. Wang, Xiao Lei (2005). "Performance evaluations for multimedia applications over PR-SCTP". University of British Columbia. pp. xii. https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/16406/ubc_2005-0336.pdf?sequence=1. Retrieved December 1, 2012. 
  2. "SMAP". http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/smap.html. Retrieved December 1, 2012. 

External links