Title: Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4
Author(s): M. Crispin.
Status: PROPOSED STANDARD
Date: Dec 1994
Length: 156660
Obsoleted by: RFC2060, RFC2061
The Internet Message Access Protocol, Version 4 (IMAP4) allows a client to access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server. IMAP4 permits manipulation of remote message folders, called "mailboxes", in a way that is functionally equivalent to local mailboxes. IMAP4 also provides the capability for an offline client to resynchronize with the server (see also [IMAP-DISC]).
IMAP4 includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; setting and clearing flags; RFC822 and MIME parsing; searching; and selective fetching of message attributes, texts, and portions thereof. Messages in IMAP4 are accessed by the use of numbers. These numbers are either message sequence numbers (relative position from 1 to the number of messages in the mailbox) or unique identifiers (immutable, strictly ascending values assigned to each message, but which are not necessarily contiguous).
IMAP4 supports a single server. A mechanism for supporting multiple IMAP4 servers is discussed in [IMSP].
IMAP4 does not specify a means of posting mail; this function is handled by a mail transfer protocol such as [SMTP].
IMAP4 is designed to be upwards compatible from the [IMAP2] protocol. Compatibility issues are discussed in [IMAP-COMPAT].
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