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The bridge is proprietary software that only supports paid users. That's a really bullshit excuse given that every other provider supports IMAP directly and for
by Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
The bridge is proprietary software that only supports paid users. That's a really bullshit excuse given that every other provider supports IMAP directly and for free, an open protocol which has been standardized for over 20 years.
An email "provider" which doesn't support IMAP/SMTP is a scam, I didn't stutter.
- zaarn 8y agoThe bridge costs money, yes. This is also stated in their FAQ. If you don't like it, you're free not to use their services. Show me the international contract of email providers that says all email providers need to give you free IMAP/SMTP access or IMAP/SMTP access at all. Even google doesn't give you IMAP/SMTP out of the box, you have to dig through the settings to enable that. I don't need this other than occasional backup via their bridge. I don't want a desktop mail client, I#ve been running Rainloop for about a year until I switch to PM and it still annoyed me to no end because frankly IMAP sucks. It sucks majorly.
- cube2222 8y agoMost of those providers are using your data for ads. It's not free. I am working on a fairly high scale email service. IMAP and POP are very resource intensive parts of our infrastructure.
- drdaeman 8y agoNot implementing IMAP because it's a poor fit is a fair excuse. It's not like they could've took some pre-existing imapd implementation, slapped a few lines of glue code and called it a day. It would've probably required a fair amount of engineering time, which is better spent on something more productive for their declared goals. The problem I see is not that they're not providing IMAP access, but that they're not providing any alternatives except for their product. Would the attitude be "here is a living API spec we currently use, subject to changes without warning, some endpoints not really documented (documentation PRs welcome), and some endpoints require paid account - but that's the best we can afford to provide" - I would've felt very differently about them.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoExcept they did invest the time. They have a bridge software, but it's proprietary and locked out for free users.
- drdaeman 8y agoActually, you're right, I have missed that bridge is a full-fledged IMAP implementation. My mistake.
- zaarn 8y agoNotable here is that the bridge runs on the users computer so they don't have to decrypt mails on their side. IMAP doesn't have a builtin way to deal with fully encrypted mail transmission including all headers and the GPG user experience is last I checked still subpar while additionally I'm fairly certain it doesn't handle fully encrypted mail.
- bartbutler 8y agoWe actually have this and have provided it on request. Also, we plan to open-source the bridge, which should alleviate your other concerns.
- drdaeman 8y agoWhy on request but not public? Why plan but not have it so from the beginning? In my opinion, it's the intent of true openness (even if there are no guarantees of stability or availability) is what matters, not the promise of eventual availability.
- bartbutler 8y agoThe API docs are available on request mostly because we are phasing out some old APIs we don't want people to use and don't have bandwidth to provide support for them. The bridge and the import/export tool are not yet open source for similar reasons 1) They are both bandwidth intensive, so we'd like to release access to them gradually 2) Part of running a freemium service is giving paid users perks, and one of those is access to closed betas before general release.