<pre><h2>Welcome to the home of the Instant Message Transport Protocol (IMTP).</h2> 

The IMTP is currently under development by Kevin M. Fitzgerald, of the Soarce 
Technologies Group.

If you have any immediate questions about technical details of the protocol, 
Please send a message to: Kevin [dot] Fitzgerald [at] Soarce [dot] us

Basic overview of the protocol:

The IMTP is an instant messageing system. Unlike traditional "central server"
systems, such as AIM or MSN, IMTP is more of a realtime version of Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol. IMTP works much the same way as SMTP works with email. With
email, users send messages to somebody@somedomain.tld, and the sender's SMTP 
server sends the message to the recipient's SMTP server. With IMTP, this 
process works identically. The sender uses an IM client that log's into their
IMTP server (let's say sendersdomain.com) and types and sends an instant 
message to a recipient's domain (let's say recipdomain.com). When the message
is sent from the sender to the recipient, the message goes from 
the sender -> sendersdomain.com -> recipdomain.com -> recipient. 

<h2>The Advantages of IMTP</h2>

There are several distinct advantages of IMTP over other IM systems. Here are
a few:

 - Messages sent to offline recipients will be stored on the recipients server
   until they log back in. 
 
 - Server load is distributed across the entire Internet vs a central server
   cluster, increasing system reliability and speed. IMTP is completly 
   autonomous.
   
 - Limited user aliases on traditional IM systems are only limited by domain,
   broadening the name pool. IE. Tom@domain.com vs Tom@otherdomain.com. No 
   need for complex and hard to remember names like Tom247 or Joe20586783.
   
 - Typically, you can reserve the same IM name as your current Email address,
   however, this is not necessarily required, as in MSN. 
   
 - Security is well thought out and rules out most chances of SPAM that
   plagues traditional SMTP email systems.
   
 - Advertisment free
   
   
 Again, if you have any questions about the IMTP protocol, please feel free 
 to contact me at Kevin [dot] Fitzgerald [at] Soarce [dot] us
 
 I'm currently working on the technical specification document, it will be 
 posted here as soon as possible.
 
 <em>Last Modified 09/25/2006 by Kevin M. Fitzgerald</em>
 </pre>