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Of course if Apple Mail claims compatibility with the worlds biggest email service they should live up to that. But it amazes, and frankly kind of depresses me

Of course if Apple Mail claims compatibility with the worlds biggest email service they should live up to that. But it amazes, and frankly kind of depresses me, that so many people on HN only see this as an Apple issue, whilst it's quite clear that Google is messing with open standards to make email (and other services) less and less portable and less accessible for third party clients. As far as I can tell, that is the root of the problem, Google's continued move away from open standards and towards old school vendor lock-in. The old phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish" comes to mind. We should know better.

kalleboo 13y ago
The problem is that IMAP is a crappy protocol. How do you layer tags onto a protocol where that was never envisioned? Where a basic function "move between folders" is an extension and not in the original protocol? IMAP doesn't even guarantee that message IDs are consistent between mailbox listings! (there's a great rant about how terrible both IMAP and all the IMAP servers out there are, can't remember by whom) I'm just glad Google still support IMAP at all instead of going fully proprietary protocol like they have with calendars, where they gave up on iCal.
- reeses 13y ago
  I was trying to remember the rant you refer to as well. I vaguely recall the core being that Mark Crispin's[1] RFCs were internally inconsistent, such that it was impossible to implement a standards-compliant IMAP server. Of course, UW-IMAP preceded the RFCs, so there was already a "reference implementation" against which other implementations could be compared and found wanting. Mark was especially obnoxious about protecting his view of IMAP. This was a weird time at the UofW. We had a hypertext system (UWIN) that was a mess and HTTP was banned as a server technology. Run a webserver for any reason, and disusering was a very real threat. They may have allowed gopher, but it's been a while. PINE, of course, came out of this, which wasn't too bad, as it inspired a number of decent successors. Best of all, Ada was the pedagogical programming language for the computer science program. Fortunately, you never used it past the second-semester CS course. [1] I just found out that he passed away late last year.
veemjeem 13y ago
Maybe Google can offer a new standard? POP & IMAP are pretty ancient protocols so I can see why they may have to introduce protocol modifications.
- barclay 13y ago
  Nice idea (and having written an IMAP service, ugh, the spec is so bad...) But, remember: they have zero incentive for you to use a mail client. They WANT you use the web client, so they can sell you for advertising.
jmurzy 13y ago
I couldn't agree more.

kalleboo 13y ago

The problem is that IMAP is a crappy protocol. How do you layer tags onto a protocol where that was never envisioned? Where a basic function "move between folders" is an extension and not in the original protocol? IMAP doesn't even guarantee that message IDs are consistent between mailbox listings! (there's a great rant about how terrible both IMAP and all the IMAP servers out there are, can't remember by whom) I'm just glad Google still support IMAP at all instead of going fully proprietary protocol like they have with calendars, where they gave up on iCal.

reeses 13y ago
I was trying to remember the rant you refer to as well. I vaguely recall the core being that Mark Crispin's[1] RFCs were internally inconsistent, such that it was impossible to implement a standards-compliant IMAP server. Of course, UW-IMAP preceded the RFCs, so there was already a "reference implementation" against which other implementations could be compared and found wanting. Mark was especially obnoxious about protecting his view of IMAP. This was a weird time at the UofW. We had a hypertext system (UWIN) that was a mess and HTTP was banned as a server technology. Run a webserver for any reason, and disusering was a very real threat. They may have allowed gopher, but it's been a while. PINE, of course, came out of this, which wasn't too bad, as it inspired a number of decent successors. Best of all, Ada was the pedagogical programming language for the computer science program. Fortunately, you never used it past the second-semester CS course. [1] I just found out that he passed away late last year.

veemjeem 13y ago

Maybe Google can offer a new standard? POP & IMAP are pretty ancient protocols so I can see why they may have to introduce protocol modifications.

barclay 13y ago
Nice idea (and having written an IMAP service, ugh, the spec is so bad...) But, remember: they have zero incentive for you to use a mail client. They WANT you use the web client, so they can sell you for advertising.

jmurzy 13y ago

I couldn't agree more.