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

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.