How does IMAP fit into the Domino server?
Greg Pflaum: When the IMAP user connects to the Domino server, the IMAP task receives the connection and authenticates the user. The authentication can either use a user name and password, or it can use X.509 certificates for authentication over SSL. Even without X.509 certificates, the connection can be encrypted with SSL. Once the user is authenticated, the server opens their mail file. After that, the IMAP user can read and write mail messages, and organize them into folders. The work to support MIME in the IMAP server meant a big increase in the use of MIME in Domino. Through enhancements to the SMTP MTA in 4.6, we also added support for full fidelity of MIME messages for POP and IMAP users. Instead of converting back and forth between Notes documents and Internet messages, we are working with the Internet message from end to end. A lot of the work we did for this MIME support in the server is going into the next major client release, which will have full native support for MIME, s
