In RFC 821, the two hosts participating in an SMTP transaction were described as the “SMTP-sender” and “SMTP-receiver”. This document has been changed to reflect current industry terminology and hence refers to them as the “SMTP client” (or sometimes just “the client”) and “SMTP server” (or just “the server”), respectively. Since a given host may act both as server and client in a relay situation, “receiver” and “sender” terminology is still used where needed for clarity.

SMTP transports a mail object. A mail object contains an envelope and content.

The SMTP envelope is sent as a series of SMTP protocol units. It consists of an originator address (to which error reports should be directed); one or more recipient addresses; and optional protocol extension material. Historically, variations on the recipient address specification command (RCPT TO) could be used to specify alternate delivery modes, such as immediate display; those variations have now been deprecated.

The SMTP content is sent in the SMTP DATA protocol unit and has two parts: the headers and the body. If the content conforms to other contemporary standards, the headers form a collection of field/value pairs structured as in the message format specification ; the body, if structured, is defined according to MIME. The content

is textual in nature, expressed using the US-ASCII repertoire.

Although SMTP extensions (such as “8BITMIME”) may relax this restriction for the content body, the content headers are always encoded using the US-ASCII repertoire. A MIME extension defines an algorithm for representing header values outside the US-ASCII repertoire, while still encoding them using the US-ASCII repertoire.

Additional mail system terminology became common after RFC 821 was published and, where convenient, is used in this specification. In particular, SMTP servers and clients provide a mail transport service and therefore act as “Mail Transfer Agents” (MTAs). “Mail User Agents” (MUAs or UAs) are normally thought of as the sources and targets of mail. At the source, an MUA might collect mail to be transmitted from a user and hand it off to an MTA; the final (“delivery”) MTA would be thought of as handing the mail off to an MUA (or at least transferring responsibility to it, e.g., by depositing the message in a “message store”).

However, while these terms are used with at least the appearance of great precision in other environments, the implied boundaries between MUAs and MTAs often do not accurately match common, and conforming, practices with Internet mail. Hence, the reader should be cautious about inferring the strong relationships and responsibilities that might be implied if these terms were used elsewhere.

SMTP sessions are stateful, with both parties carefully maintaining a common view of the current state. In this document we model this state by a virtual “buffer” and a “state table” on the server which may be used by the client to, for example, “clear the buffer” or “reset the state table,” causing the information in the buffer to be discarded and the state to be returned to some previous state.

This specification makes a distinction among four types of SMTP systems, based on the role those systems play in transmitting electronic mail. An “originating” system (sometimes called an SMTP originator) introduces mail into the Internet or, more generally, into a transport service environment. A “delivery” SMTP system is one that receives mail from a transport service environment and passes it to a mail user agent or deposits it in a message store which a mail user agent is expected to subsequently access. A “relay” SMTP system (usually referred to just as a “relay”) receives mail from an SMTP client and transmits it, without modification to the message data other than adding trace information, to another SMTP server for further relaying or for delivery.

A “gateway” SMTP system (usually referred to just as a “gateway”) receives mail from a client system in one transport environment and transmits it to a server system in another transport environment.

Differences in protocols or message semantics between the transport environments on either side of a gateway may require that the gateway system perform transformations to the message that are not permitted to SMTP relay systems. For the purposes of this specification, firewalls that rewrite addresses should be considered as gateways, even if SMTP is used on both sides of them.

The terms “message content” and “mail data” are used interchangeably in this document to describe the material transmitted after the DATA command is accepted and before the end of data indication is transmitted. Message content includes message headers and the possibly-structured message body. The MIME specification provides the standard mechanisms for structured message bodies.