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From: mrc@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip,comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Re: Where Can I Get The IMAP Specification?
Message-ID: <1991Jun29.030833.9957@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 29 Jun 91 03:08:33 GMT
References: <2869DA1E.614E@intercon.com> <1991Jun28.024011.10286@milton.u.washington.edu> <1991Jun28.224703.9915@socrates.umd.edu>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 36

In article <1991Jun28.224703.9915@socrates.umd.edu> coates@UC780.UMD.EDU writes:
>Wis IMAP? Please post.

IMAP is an Interactive Mail Access Protocol.  It differs from the POP
style of protocols in that IMAP focuses on maintaining a mailbox on a
remote repository and not on a client.  POP on the other hand is
designed to fetch mail from a repository onto the client and remote it
from the repository.  In other words, they do fundamentally different
things even though the idea (email on a personal machine but using a
central machine as a maildrop) is the same in both.

IMAP also has some fancy facilities to make it possible to do various
things (e.g. remote searching) that would be prohibitively expensive
with POP.  IMAP was designed to scale well with very large mailboxes
and with high latency/high RTT networks.  I regularly read my mail
from home on a NeXT using 2400 baud SLIP with IMAP.

Another neat thing about IMAP is that it has the capability to parse
the message remotely, so a client doesn't need to know about all the
details of RFC-822 or of the new multi-part/typed mail body stuff.
It's all converted into a easily machine-readable structure unaffected
by the various perverse ideas of visual esthetics which inflict
RFC-822 headers.

IMAP was first conceived by me in 1985.  That first version is now
extinct.  The modern version, called IMAP2, was originally documented
in my RFC-1064.  That RFC had a few typographic errors introduced in
the RFC editing process and a few extensions to the protocol had
become widely accepted.  I issued a subsequent RFC-1176 to replace
RFC-1064; it corrected those errors, documented the (minor)
extensions, and clarified some aspects of the architecture that people
had found confusing.

IMAP2 has been implemented on a variety of client and server
platforms; unfortunately for some reason a finished PC client has
eluded us.  A number of people are reportedly working on a PC client.