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Simple Mail Access Protocol

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The Simple Mail Access Protocol (SMAP) 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.

Notable features of SMAP:

  • MIME attachments can be transmitted in their raw, decoded form. This allows large base64-encoded attachments to be transmatted without the 4:3 inflation that base64 encoding usually incurs.
  • Direct support for relaying outgoing messages over the SMAP connection, instead of using a separate SMTP connection. An outgoing message only needs to be transmitted once to send it to its recipients 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 other side does not support SMAP.

As of 2005, SMAP is still considered experimental, and is only supported by the Courier IMAP server and Cone client.

See also

  • POP4 (another emerging protocol, also motivated by IMAP's complexity)
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