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OP's point was that one of IMAP's weakenesses is that it provides no clean way to represent what gmail does.
by gcr 13y ago
OP's point was that one of IMAP's weakenesses is that it provides no clean way to represent what gmail does.
- saurik 13y agoThis is incorrect: Gmail could (and really should) be represented as a single mailbox, with labels mapping to flags. Combined with support for the (widely implemented in non-Gmail servers) QRESYNC extension to make resynchronization of the flags efficient, this would be a great mapping of Gmail's semantics to IMAP. However, most IMAP clients expose mailboxes as "folders" and barely support flags at all (no indexing, not even slow search, no UI at all most of the time, and if it even bothers to parse them, often has some silly limit like "five flags that must be configured ahead-of-time in Settings"), so users would have had a totally useless experience. In essence, Gmail's IMAP is implemented the way it is not because it is the best way to map Gmail's semantics on to IMAP, but because it provides a reasonable fit to the way Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail (the only e-mail clients that have any marketshare) represent IMAP. Those clients represent trees of mailboxes as a folder hierarchy. While commonly believed, people really need to stop blaming IMAP for Gmail: it's about as silly as claiming using HTTP headers as part of an API specification is impossible because none of IE, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, allow users to modify the headers in their document-oriented web browsers.
- maaaats 13y agoActually I meant that it's one of Gmail weaknesses that I need a gmail-specific client to use it properly.