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"Eudora was specifically designed with the idea that standards are a key to successful adoption. Indeed, the rapid acceptance of the Internet is largely due to

"Eudora was specifically designed with the idea that standards are a key to successful adoption. Indeed, the rapid acceptance of the Internet is largely due to the standardization process. Published standards are what allow applications from multiple sources to cooperate with each other. Without standards organizations would only be able to use their own applications together, and not those from outside. Also, by allowing diversity of implementations you achieve a much more robust software ecosystem." - From the "Windows Eudora Architecture.pdf" in the distribution

bdamm 8y ago
This is beautiful. One of the "so obvious it's invisible" truths of the modern age, and I nearly forgot that Eudora and other pioneers of the age were making a somewhat risky choice to only support standard protocols and eschew the proprietary mailers. Most of them are now long dead yet POP3, IMAP, SNMP chug along. At the time, though, it wasn't so clear.
- kps 8y ago
  Eudora also had (has?) UUCP spool support, for those not yet connected to the Internet. I used it that way originally.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  POP3 is horribly inefficient and SNMP is a security disaster waiting to happen. At least POP3 isn’t widely used anymore.
  - wila 8y ago
    Most likely the post you're replying to meant smtp instear of snmp. Makes more sense for a remark about a mail client. I see this typo more often.
  - kps 8y ago
    Why is POP3 horribly inefficient? Lack of an equivalent to the IMAP COMPRESS extension?
    - throwaway76543 8y ago
      It's fine if it's used to simply pull down mail to a local spool. The inefficiency complaints usually stem from attempting to maintain mail on a remote server across multiple clients. POP3 does not implement a sufficiently rich protocol to make this possible without downloading the entire spool onto each client. For example, no searching.
      - glandium 8y ago
        No, it's highly inefficient in the face of latency, because there essentially is no batch fetching primitive. Fetching messages over a high latency connection (e.g. to a server on the other side of Earth) takes forever if you have a lot of messages.
        throwaway76543 8y ago
        That's addressed by pipelining (rfc2449, published back in 1998). No batch primitive is necessary if the request/response sequence isn't serialized. The lack of a remote manipulation interface has always been a problem, however.
    - tinus_hn 8y ago
      POP3 is only efficient if you download all mail to the client and immediately remove it from the server. But nobody does that, everyone leaves their mail on the server. Then everytime you synchronize the server has to go through all the mail it has to see what you don’t have, which is very inefficient if you have 10000 mails in your inbox, like most people have these days. It’s optimized for a usecase that doesn’t exist anymore and it will work in the usecase that does exist while wasting a lot of resources. Truly the worst you can have. It’d be better if it didn’t work at all.
      - 8y ago
- swasheck 8y ago
  Wait. SNMP or SMTP? I'm legitimately asking and not being pedantic because I'm genuinely curious.
  - eitally 8y ago
    SMTP.
kome 8y ago
Tell that to Gmail people... Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16830156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16830156
- ajross 8y ago
  Not sure how message expiry is a standards compliance issue. SMTP, MIME and RFC822 et. al. don't say anything about where, how or if the message gets stored once transmitted.
  - cat199 8y ago
    > Not sure how message expiry is a standards compliance issue. using market-influence to build massive scale expectation for a feature which can't actually be supported by the underlying protocol in an effort to 'embrace and extend' is exactly a standards compliance issue, and precisely what led to microsoft's internet explorer being labeled as an antitrust violation.
- behringer 8y ago
  One of the commenters on that article wrote: > Well, I think this works differently. The email just includes a link to a Google webpage with the email. It’s still just an email sitting in your inbox. It doesn’t remove itself automatically. So it's not a standards issue at all.
  - romwell 8y ago
    It's an abuse of the standard. The email standard was built so that you can check your email with a client, and view the contents offline at your convenience, archive, back up, etc. Google's email proposal kills this functionality. When was the last time I used this, you may ask? On Saturday. I was in one of the slot canyons in Utah with zero signal, and, while taking a break, I wrote several emails in my Opera email client, in response to some messages I've procrastinated writing a response to. The trickery is that the sender might think they're sending a message over email to the recipient, whereas they are sending the message to Google's servers over an internal protocol, and are sending a link to the message to the recipient over email.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

bdamm 8y ago

This is beautiful. One of the "so obvious it's invisible" truths of the modern age, and I nearly forgot that Eudora and other pioneers of the age were making a somewhat risky choice to only support standard protocols and eschew the proprietary mailers. Most of them are now long dead yet POP3, IMAP, SNMP chug along. At the time, though, it wasn't so clear.

kps 8y ago
Eudora also had (has?) UUCP spool support, for those not yet connected to the Internet. I used it that way originally.
tinus_hn 8y ago
POP3 is horribly inefficient and SNMP is a security disaster waiting to happen. At least POP3 isn’t widely used anymore.
- wila 8y ago
  Most likely the post you're replying to meant smtp instear of snmp. Makes more sense for a remark about a mail client. I see this typo more often.
- kps 8y ago
  Why is POP3 horribly inefficient? Lack of an equivalent to the IMAP COMPRESS extension?
  - throwaway76543 8y ago
    It's fine if it's used to simply pull down mail to a local spool. The inefficiency complaints usually stem from attempting to maintain mail on a remote server across multiple clients. POP3 does not implement a sufficiently rich protocol to make this possible without downloading the entire spool onto each client. For example, no searching.
    - glandium 8y ago
      No, it's highly inefficient in the face of latency, because there essentially is no batch fetching primitive. Fetching messages over a high latency connection (e.g. to a server on the other side of Earth) takes forever if you have a lot of messages.
      - throwaway76543 8y ago
        That's addressed by pipelining (rfc2449, published back in 1998). No batch primitive is necessary if the request/response sequence isn't serialized. The lack of a remote manipulation interface has always been a problem, however.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    POP3 is only efficient if you download all mail to the client and immediately remove it from the server. But nobody does that, everyone leaves their mail on the server. Then everytime you synchronize the server has to go through all the mail it has to see what you don’t have, which is very inefficient if you have 10000 mails in your inbox, like most people have these days. It’s optimized for a usecase that doesn’t exist anymore and it will work in the usecase that does exist while wasting a lot of resources. Truly the worst you can have. It’d be better if it didn’t work at all.
    - 8y ago
swasheck 8y ago
Wait. SNMP or SMTP? I'm legitimately asking and not being pedantic because I'm genuinely curious.
- eitally 8y ago
  SMTP.

kome 8y ago

Tell that to Gmail people... Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16830156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16830156

ajross 8y ago
Not sure how message expiry is a standards compliance issue. SMTP, MIME and RFC822 et. al. don't say anything about where, how or if the message gets stored once transmitted.
- cat199 8y ago
  > Not sure how message expiry is a standards compliance issue. using market-influence to build massive scale expectation for a feature which can't actually be supported by the underlying protocol in an effort to 'embrace and extend' is exactly a standards compliance issue, and precisely what led to microsoft's internet explorer being labeled as an antitrust violation.
behringer 8y ago
One of the commenters on that article wrote: > Well, I think this works differently. The email just includes a link to a Google webpage with the email. It’s still just an email sitting in your inbox. It doesn’t remove itself automatically. So it's not a standards issue at all.
- romwell 8y ago
  It's an abuse of the standard. The email standard was built so that you can check your email with a client, and view the contents offline at your convenience, archive, back up, etc. Google's email proposal kills this functionality. When was the last time I used this, you may ask? On Saturday. I was in one of the slot canyons in Utah with zero signal, and, while taking a break, I wrote several emails in my Opera email client, in response to some messages I've procrastinated writing a response to. The trickery is that the sender might think they're sending a message over email to the recipient, whereas they are sending the message to Google's servers over an internal protocol, and are sending a link to the message to the recipient over email.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]