The emailing infrastructure is one of the most stable communication mechanisms. A SOAP message that is packaged in a MIME structure can be easily layered on top of SMTP and carried forward.
The other protocol that is widely used for exchanging SOAP messages is HTTP because it is the most commonly used communication protocol over the Internet. A SOAP message can further derive the benefit of transmitting secure messages by binding to HTTP Secure, or HTTPS, instead of HTTP.
In addition to the emailing protocols, HTTP and HTTPS, a SOAP message can also use FTP to communicate. FTP provides secure messaging because access to FTP servers are authenticated. Also, role-based restrictions can be applied to specific directories on the FTP server, which can further secure the communication.
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