I'm advocating for a change in the IMAP specification to allow outgoing email to be sent over the same connection as incoming rather that having to separately configure outgoing SMTP email. There are two significant advantages to this concept.
It would greatly simplify setup for clients as they would only have to configure one connection rather than two.
Spam reduction by authentication. The sending of email over the same connection tells the server that the person who is the sender of the email also has demonstrated they have access to read the account. This would be a powerful whitelisting criteria for eliminating fake senders.
So - my question. It seems that it would be easy to do this if there were a standard. Dovecot would merely hand incoming email off to the outgoing SMTP server. Besides the difficulty of getting a standard created, am I right on my assumptions?