The Simple Mail Access Protocol (SMAP) is an

application layer An application layer is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communications protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communications network. An ''application layer'' abstraction is specified in both the Internet Protocol ...

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

protocol for accessing

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

stored on a server. It was introduced as part of the

Courier A courier is a person or organisation that delivers a message, package or letter from one place or person to another place or person. Typically, a courier provides their courier service on a commercial contract basis; however, some couriers are ...

suite Suite may refer to: Arts and entertainment *Suite (music), a set of musical pieces considered as one composition ** Suite (Bach), a list of suites composed by J. S. Bach ** Suite (Cassadó), a mid-1920s composition by Gaspar Cassadó ** ''Suite' ...

, with the goal of creating a simpler and more capable alternative to

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of pe ...

. , SMAP is still considered experimental, and is only supported by the Courier server and

Cone A cone is a three-dimensional geometric shape that tapers smoothly from a flat base (frequently, though not necessarily, circular) to a point called the apex or vertex. A cone is formed by a set of line segments, half-lines, or lines co ...

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuabl ...

Features

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Messa ...

attachments can be transmitted in their raw, decoded form. This allows large

base64 In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data (more specifically, a sequence of 8-bit bytes) in sequences of 24 bits that can be represented by four 6-bit Base64 digits. Common to all bina ...

-encoded attachments to be transmitted without the 4:3 inflation that base64 encoding usually incurs. * Support for sending outgoing e-mails through the SMAP connection, instead of using a separate

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...

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 Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

folder names, with native support for hierarchy. * SMAP clients and servers can fall back to IMAP if the peer does not support SMAP.

References

External links

Simple Mail Access Protocol, Version 1
{{E-mail clients Internet mail protocolsTreeHouse

Features

See also

References

External links