smtp - How can you send mail using IMAP?

Question

I am developing a lightweight Gmail client for mobile phones, accessing Gmail by IMAP. I want to send a draft from the Drafts folder, but it has some attachments and I cannot download all of them to send it by SMTP.

Moving/copying it to "Sent Mail" does not send it, just moves it to that folder.

How can I send a Draft directly without fetching all the content and attachments from the client? Is there any IMAP command to do it?

Answer 1

IMAP is a mailbox protocol. It does not (natively) support sending mail, only accessing it. In order to send mail you must use SMTP. Its possible that there is an IMAP extension for sending mail, and its possible that Google Mail supports that extension, but I doubt it. Hence, if you want to send an email with attachments, you must actually have the full content of the message available to you to send.