Simple Mail Access Protocol

The Simple Mail Access Protocol (SMAP)[1] is an application layer Internet protocol for accessing e-mail 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" (PDF). University of British Columbia. pp. xii. Retrieved December 1, 2012.
  2. "SMAP". Retrieved December 1, 2012.
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