[Dovecot] Sending email over IMAP?

[Marc Perkel]

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.

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.

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?