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At least half of the blame should be not on them. IMAP doesn't know a thing about what happened to email in last 10 years (few minor exceptions apply). They're

At least half of the blame should be not on them. IMAP doesn't know a thing about what happened to email in last 10 years (few minor exceptions apply). They're merely implementing their own means to access email in convenient and modern way. Say, IMAP has no labels[1] or contacts[2] (and many other things) - there are proprietary extensions, MS Exchange being the most famous one, but they're... proprietary. And given that proprietary implementations differ, it makes sense to create an unifying wrapper. And JS apps and web services are just an approach that's trendy today. Personally, I don't like it either, but can't blame for going with the flow. Especially since it's a business (and going against the flow has costs, both in development and adoption), not a private project where one can do things in a way that just feels right, ignoring anything else. I believe it would absolutely make sense to bundle the "sync engine" within the mail client, though, to make it standalone. But I understand it's done this way just because there was only the engine (as a service, not a library) at the beginning. ____ [1] https://nylas.com/docs/#labels https://nylas.com/docs/#labels [2] https://nylas.com/docs/#contacts https://nylas.com/docs/#contacts

nadams 11y ago
> but they're... proprietary Everything you ever wanted to know about Exchange [1] (but were afraid to ask). I personally use SOGo [2] as a Exchange ActiveSync provider but I know OpenChange is a project to implement the entire Exchange stack. So I would not consider it proprietary. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307725%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307725%28v=exchg.... [2] http://www.sogo.nu/ http://www.sogo.nu/
tormeh 11y ago
>IMAP doesn't know a thing about what happened to email in last 10 years Sounds like it's time for a new protocol, then. Is anything in the works?
- e12e 11y ago
  JMAP? http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/
saurik 11y ago
IMAP actually does have labels. They are called flags. Servers tend to not implement them well at all (sometimes allowing only a handful to exist, and almost never keeping an index for that metadata, meaning that searches by flag are either slow or often not even allowed :/), but that is not the fault of IMAP.
- e12e 11y ago
  Apparently, most sane open source IMAP servers support PERMANENTFLAGS \ * which as I understand it means user-defined flags?: http://serverfault.com/questions/115769/which-imap-flags-are-reliably-supported-across-most-mail-servers http://serverfault.com/questions/115769/which-imap-flags-are... I'm not entirely sure what's "happened with email in 10 years"? Search-defined virtual folders?
  - saurik 11y ago
    And, FWIW, search defined virtual folder is a client concept and would be trivially implemented over IMAP's incredibly powerful (and I believe I remember being even extensible) search commands, if only IMAP servers tended to provide the right kinds of index to make such queries fast. (I know this, as I was working on a highly scalable and very efficient IMAP server a few years ago that I had to force myself to stop working on as it was too much of a distraction from the things in life that are actually capable of putting food on the table.) Mark Crispin was actually pretty-damned prescient when it came to IMAP: he believed that client operations should be offloaded to a server that would have much more disk space and CPU than the client, which is exactly the model everyone reaches for today, and thereby designed a thin client protocol that had asynchronous updates baked into its core. A few years ago, he passed away: here is what I wrote at the time about his mission for IMAP and history on the project. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826113 Really, the only thing in IMAP to actively dislike is how the thin client view requires the server to have a "dense" (here I mean the mathematics term, not from the technical spec) numbering of messages the client is modeling in its view (this is the reason opening a large mailbox via Zimbra takes forever, and why many IMAP servers have dumb global locks), but I have come up with some techniques that should allow me to handle that with minimal overhead. Otherwise, with some of the modern extensions in place (QRESYNC, for example), IMAP is pretty damned awesome.
spang 11y ago
Bundling the sync engine with the client works if you're willing to download your entire mail archive onto every device that connects to your mail. An implementation of the sync engine that allowed only syncing partial mailboxes would be very difficult to implement on top of (all of) IMAP, Exchange, and Gmail. By abstracting that away into a new cloud service, clients end up being both simpler and more flexible.
pbreit 11y ago
Labels are over. And contacts could be done ousted of IMAP.
jbb555 11y ago
Nothing happened to email in the last 10 years, IMAP is fine.

nadams 11y ago

> but they're... proprietary Everything you ever wanted to know about Exchange [1] (but were afraid to ask). I personally use SOGo [2] as a Exchange ActiveSync provider but I know OpenChange is a project to implement the entire Exchange stack. So I would not consider it proprietary. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307725%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307725%28v=exchg.... [2] http://www.sogo.nu/ http://www.sogo.nu/

tormeh 11y ago

>IMAP doesn't know a thing about what happened to email in last 10 years Sounds like it's time for a new protocol, then. Is anything in the works?

e12e 11y ago
JMAP? http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/

saurik 11y ago

IMAP actually does have labels. They are called flags. Servers tend to not implement them well at all (sometimes allowing only a handful to exist, and almost never keeping an index for that metadata, meaning that searches by flag are either slow or often not even allowed :/), but that is not the fault of IMAP.

e12e 11y ago
Apparently, most sane open source IMAP servers support PERMANENTFLAGS \ * which as I understand it means user-defined flags?: http://serverfault.com/questions/115769/which-imap-flags-are-reliably-supported-across-most-mail-servers http://serverfault.com/questions/115769/which-imap-flags-are... I'm not entirely sure what's "happened with email in 10 years"? Search-defined virtual folders?
- saurik 11y ago
  And, FWIW, search defined virtual folder is a client concept and would be trivially implemented over IMAP's incredibly powerful (and I believe I remember being even extensible) search commands, if only IMAP servers tended to provide the right kinds of index to make such queries fast. (I know this, as I was working on a highly scalable and very efficient IMAP server a few years ago that I had to force myself to stop working on as it was too much of a distraction from the things in life that are actually capable of putting food on the table.) Mark Crispin was actually pretty-damned prescient when it came to IMAP: he believed that client operations should be offloaded to a server that would have much more disk space and CPU than the client, which is exactly the model everyone reaches for today, and thereby designed a thin client protocol that had asynchronous updates baked into its core. A few years ago, he passed away: here is what I wrote at the time about his mission for IMAP and history on the project. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826113 Really, the only thing in IMAP to actively dislike is how the thin client view requires the server to have a "dense" (here I mean the mathematics term, not from the technical spec) numbering of messages the client is modeling in its view (this is the reason opening a large mailbox via Zimbra takes forever, and why many IMAP servers have dumb global locks), but I have come up with some techniques that should allow me to handle that with minimal overhead. Otherwise, with some of the modern extensions in place (QRESYNC, for example), IMAP is pretty damned awesome.

spang 11y ago

Bundling the sync engine with the client works if you're willing to download your entire mail archive onto every device that connects to your mail. An implementation of the sync engine that allowed only syncing partial mailboxes would be very difficult to implement on top of (all of) IMAP, Exchange, and Gmail. By abstracting that away into a new cloud service, clients end up being both simpler and more flexible.

pbreit 11y ago

Labels are over. And contacts could be done ousted of IMAP.

jbb555 11y ago

Nothing happened to email in the last 10 years, IMAP is fine.