Announcement of MailConnect 6

Greetings again. IMC is pleased to announce our next testing event, 
MailConnect 6. The event will focus on IMAP4, POP3, and SMTP, and will be 
held May 31 and June 1 in San Jose, CA. Full details are available at 
<http://www.imc.org/imc-mailconnect/>.

The two days of MailConnect 6 will focus on IMAP4. IMAP4 is a 
well-established specification with new facilities promising substantial 
improvement for mobile and client/server mail environments. IMAP4 
implementations have fully emerged, although the large number of new of 
IMAP extensions have not been subjected to wide inter-vendor testing. 
MailConnect 6 will provide an opportunity for intense interoperability 
testing and repair of IMAP4 implementations.

During the previous MailConnect events, it has become clear that client 
developers need to pay more attention to the disconnected mode of IMAP. 
MailConnect is an excellent place for client and server vendors to test 
interoperability in this area. Further, IMAP is a dynamic protocol, and 
many valuable extensions have been proposed in the past year. Developers 
will want to meet with other developers at MailConnect to test their early 
implementations of these extensions.

Because most IMAP vendors also have POP3 and SMTP implementations, 
MailConnect 6 will be a good place to test them as well. A new round of 
extensions to POP have come out in the past year, and client vendors have 
expressed strong interest in testing these. Also in the past year, many 
extensions to SMTP have been standardized and deployed; these new features 
will be the focus of the SMTP testing at MailConnect 6. Specifically, 
message submission, SMTP over TLS, and SMTP authorization are likely 
candidates for participant testing.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium