If you are using the modern Stalwart Mail Server, you may have noticed a classic email architecture pain point:
When you send emails using clients like Thunderbird or Outlook, the sent emails dutifully reside in the “Sent” folder; however, when you configure notification bots (e.g.,
[email protected]) or ERP systems to send emails automatically via the SMTP protocol, the outbox is empty.
Why is this happening? This is because the standard SMTP protocol is only responsible for “transmission,” not “storage.” Desktop clients are able to save backups because they perform an additional IMAP upload operation after sending. Simple SMTP scripts usually do not perform this step.