<?xml version='1.0'?>

<reference anchor='RFC1730'>

<front>
<title abbrev='IMAP4'>Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4</title>
<author initials='M.' surname='Crispin' fullname='Mark R. Crispin'>
<organization>University of Washington, Networks and Distributed Computing</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>JE-30</street>
<city>Seattle</city>
<region>WA</region>
<code>98195</code>
<country>US</country></postal>
<phone>+1 206 543 5762</phone>
<email>MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU</email></address></author>
<date month='December' year='1994' />
<abstract>
<t>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).</t>
<t>IMAP4 includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; setting and clearing flags; RFC 822 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).</t>
<t>IMAP4 supports a single server.  A mechanism for supporting multiple IMAP4 servers is discussed in.</t>
<t>IMAP4 does not specify a means of posting mail; this function is handled by a mail transfer protocol such as.</t>
<t>IMAP4 is designed to be upwards compatible from theprotocol.  Compatibility issues are discussed in.</t></abstract></front>

<seriesInfo name='RFC' value='1730' />
</reference>
