The Network Independent Transport Service [6] may be used.
The SMTP transmission channel is established via NITS between the sender process and receiver process. The sender process executes the CONNECT primitive, and the waiting receiver process executes the ACCEPT primitive.
The NITS connection supports the transmission of 8-bit bytes. The SMTP data is 7-bit ASCII characters. Each character is transmitted as an 8-bit byte with the high-order bit cleared to zero.