The Transmission Control Protocol [3] is used in the ARPA Internet, and in any network following the US DoD standards for internetwork protocols.
The SMTP transmission channel is a TCP connection established between the sender process port U and the receiver process port L. This single full duplex connection is used as the transmission channel. This protocol is assigned the service port 25 (31 octal), that is L=25.
The TCP 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.