Quoting Marc Perkel marc@perkel.com:
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.
And at least as many significant disadvantages.
- It would greatly simplify setup for clients as they would only have to configure one connection rather than two.
This is only true if they want to send via the same mechanism they receive from.
- 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.
Most all MTA systems already allow authentication, so this buys you nothing.
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?
I don't think it matters if it is easy or difficult to do, either in general or for any particular IMAP software. But it does matter that there is a standard. And a way to fall back in the client for those systems which pre-date the new standard.
-- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin
Go Longhorns!