[Dovecot] Sending email over IMAP?

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Marc Perkel <marc at 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.

> 1) 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.

> 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.

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!