Simple Mail Access Protocol

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SMAP in the TCP / IP protocol stack :
application SMAP
transport TCP
Internet IP ( IPv4 , IPv6 )
Network access Ethernet Token
bus 		Token
ring 		FDDI ...

The Simple Mail Access Protocol (SMAP) is a network protocol for e-mails in the client-server model .

Similar to the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) in terms of its objectives , SMAP offers more efficiency than this and also makes the parallel use of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which also requires the Post Office Protocol (POP), unnecessary . The client does not need to communicate with two servers, but only with one.

The syntax of SMAP is more similar to that of POP and SMTP than that of IMAP.

SMAP offers particular advantages for managing e-mail messages on the server that are not possible with IMAP:

  • When a message is sent, it is first stored in a separate folder on the server and a copy is then transferred to a mail transfer agent . With IMAP, it is at best possible to have the server keep a copy by taking an additional step, which is associated with a second data transfer.
  • By decoding Base64 -coded MIME -coded file attachments into the normal 8-bit format on the server , the bandwidth requirement for downloading can be reduced by 25%.
  • Directory names use the Unicode ( UTF-8 ) text encoding. This means that the user does not have to worry about the underlying file structure of the directories. The separators used in IMAP to differentiate between directory structures are no longer blocked in SMAP.
  • In contrast to IMAP, with SMAP a complete index of the directory does not have to be downloaded again when a directory is opened again from the server . The client compares the locally stored index of the directory with any changes that may have occurred on the server and thus receives a current index.

Further features with regard to internationalization are already planned, but not yet implemented in a prototype.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Simple Mail Access Protocol, Version 1 . Sam Varshavchik. Retrieved June 2, 2011.