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I'm also a big fan of IMAP and would love to see everyone keep to it. At the moment I haven't found an IMAP client better than trojita (http://trojita.flaska.ne

by rakoo 11y ago

I'm also a big fan of IMAP and would love to see everyone keep to it. At the moment I haven't found an IMAP client better than trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/ http://trojita.flaska.net/) which actually uses IMAP the way it was designed to and not as a poor man's sync mechanism. However, there are things that IMAP can't do: * Search has to be mailbox by mailbox. So if you have a huge number of mailboxes it's going to take a long time. There is, of course, an extension for multi-mailbox search, but its very low adoption hasn't made the thing practical * Read notification just can't be done with the traditional email system, short of replying with a specifically-formatted email and introducing some kind of RPC * Send Later while offline can't be done with the traditional email system. There's just nothing you can do for that.

coldtea 11y ago
>I'm also a big fan of IMAP and would love to see everyone keep to it. Probably because you've never read the spec or tried to implement it.
- rakoo 11y ago
  Or, more probably, because I've actually read the spec and understood what IMAP really tries to do, saw how widespread its usage was in so many languages, and imagined what could be possible with a protocol we already have. I have toyed with it in the past already, and intend to do in the future because just everybody has it, with or without their knowledge, and can use its power. Yes, IMAP is messy and inconsistent and hard to parse, if you blindly read examples and try to build a naive parser out of that. When you're trying to do as much as IMAP tries to do starting from scratch, that's barely surprising. Still, IMAP already has many tools, libraries and software that can be re-used.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Still, IMAP already has many tools, libraries and software that can be re-used. That's the problem though, those tools and libraries only give you IMAP-like behavior, and modern mail clients want to go beyond that -- from tagging to snoozing and lots more besides. And IMAP makes it a hell to have something more intelligent on top.
    - rakoo 11y ago
      No, they give you IMAP capabilities; it's up to the client to build something more intelligent on top of that -- tagging and snoozing are totally compatible with IMAP as long as the client does something intelligent (it doesn't even have to be extremely non-standard; IMAP keywords and mailboxes can do the job perfectly here). Your mail client doesn't have to be a 1-1 mapping to IMAP commands, like pretty much all mail clients are. This problem is the same as GPG. Why is GPG not more widespread ? It is widely accepted that the technical parts may be old but are still solid, the real problem is the UI. It is still immensely difficult to create your own keychain and share your keys with someone else. Only in the latest versions does gpg introduce TOFU. It has always been a UI problem, and will remain this way until someone wants to tackle it... or replaces gpg.

by rakoo 11y ago

coldtea 11y ago

>I'm also a big fan of IMAP and would love to see everyone keep to it. Probably because you've never read the spec or tried to implement it.

rakoo 11y ago
Or, more probably, because I've actually read the spec and understood what IMAP really tries to do, saw how widespread its usage was in so many languages, and imagined what could be possible with a protocol we already have. I have toyed with it in the past already, and intend to do in the future because just everybody has it, with or without their knowledge, and can use its power. Yes, IMAP is messy and inconsistent and hard to parse, if you blindly read examples and try to build a naive parser out of that. When you're trying to do as much as IMAP tries to do starting from scratch, that's barely surprising. Still, IMAP already has many tools, libraries and software that can be re-used.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Still, IMAP already has many tools, libraries and software that can be re-used. That's the problem though, those tools and libraries only give you IMAP-like behavior, and modern mail clients want to go beyond that -- from tagging to snoozing and lots more besides. And IMAP makes it a hell to have something more intelligent on top.
  - rakoo 11y ago
    No, they give you IMAP capabilities; it's up to the client to build something more intelligent on top of that -- tagging and snoozing are totally compatible with IMAP as long as the client does something intelligent (it doesn't even have to be extremely non-standard; IMAP keywords and mailboxes can do the job perfectly here). Your mail client doesn't have to be a 1-1 mapping to IMAP commands, like pretty much all mail clients are. This problem is the same as GPG. Why is GPG not more widespread ? It is widely accepted that the technical parts may be old but are still solid, the real problem is the UI. It is still immensely difficult to create your own keychain and share your keys with someone else. Only in the latest versions does gpg introduce TOFU. It has always been a UI problem, and will remain this way until someone wants to tackle it... or replaces gpg.