tl;dr their new mail standard is a web app. "Why use HTTPS/JSON? The short answer is it’s good enough, widely understood and it’s by far the easiest thing for

tl;dr their new mail standard is a web app. "Why use HTTPS/JSON? The short answer is it’s good enough, widely understood and it’s by far the easiest thing for developers to adopt. There’s support in basically all OSes and programming languages. It’s easy to read and debug." Why not INI files, then, or a CSV, delivered over DNS? "Wide support and rapid adoption" is great if you're trying to make money, but not necessarily a great technical design framework. The reason webapps work with HTTP/JSON is they had to. They were built on top of old standards which had to be backwards compatible, and they had to work around holes in the existing technology. So they took existing tech and extended it, and made it simple enough for everyone to adopt it warts and all, rather than improve it. We've been slowly patching its gross inefficiencies ever since. An IMAP replacement does not have to work over a web platform, so it does not need this kind of unnecessary coupling of disparate, complicated standards to make it more clunky. But they're doing it anyway. So, why build a complicated new protocol on top of difficult, completely unrelated standards? This new standard only exists as a vehicle for their own services and products, because they need other people to adopt it for it to make sense as a product they can make money on vs their competitors. They could have just worked with the industry on the next generation of IMAP, but that wouldn't be adopted "as quickly" to lock an industry into the model they are already developing.