But - if it were part of IMAP then half of the setup goes away. Outgoing email configuration goes away.On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 11:05, Marc Perkel wrote: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. 1) It would greatly simplify setup for clients as they would only have to configure one connection rather than two.Why would it be easier for a client to add a new sending method than to simply have an option to use the same credentials for smtp auth for sending.
But - the incoming server and outgoing server can be and usually are different. I can send email spoofing anyone. But if I send through IMAP I would be showing the server that the person sending the email has access to read the email. This would be powerful as an authentication mechanism. With authenticated SMTP all you are says to the world is that you have some account somewhere that will accept your email, but not that you can read it. See the difference?2) 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.Smtp auth already handles this.
Not making things worse with another standard, just convenient and it has the ability to demonstrate that the email came for the connection that read the email. Is simplification and identity verification.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?Most current MUA's already handle smtp authentication and ssl. Why make things worse with yet another standard?