Simple Mail Access Protocol

The Simple Mail Access Protocol (SMAP ) is a network protocol for e- mails in the client - server model.

The objective of the Internet Message Access Protocol likeness, SMAP offers more efficiency than this and also eliminates the parallel use of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which even the Post Office Protocol requires. The client does not need to communicate with two servers, but only one.

The syntax of SMAP is the POP and SMTP similar than that of IMAP.

SMAP offers particular advantages in managing e- mail messages on the server, which are not possible with IMAP:

• When sending a message, it is first stored in a separate folder on the server and then passed by this transfer to copy a mail agent. When IMAP is at most by an additional step possible to make the server keep a copy, which is associated with a second data transfer.
• To 25 % reduced bandwidth when downloading MIME - encoded attachments. Due to the direct download of the binary code, the Base64 encoding of attachments is unnecessary.
• Directory name using the Unicode ( UTF -8) text encoding. As a result, the user has to worry about the underlying file structure of directories. The usual IMAP delimiter for distinguishing directory structures are no longer locked in SMAP.
• Unlike IMAP, a complete index of the directory must be downloaded from SMAP when you reopen a directory by the server again. The client compares the locally stored index of the directory, if necessary, with the changes that occurred on the server giving it a current index.

Other features in terms of internationalization are already planned, but not yet implemented in a prototype.