Has IMAP been a slow starter?

[Pete Maclean]

A customer recently posed the following question to me:

>> I am curious about something based upon observation.....Has IMAP been a slow
>> starter because most people do not understand its capabilities intuitively??
>> From what I have seen, people understand at least some of the sharing and
>> folder features of MS Exchange and most of the capabilities of POP. But
>> these same people do not seem to understand that there is a protocol
>> difference between the two and that sharing and folder access is enabled
>> through this protocol. Has this been your experience as well?? Also, do you
>> think that imap.org does a good job about getting the word out about IMAP??

I am unable to do a good job of answering this and wonder if anyone out there on the list would like to chime in with some helpful comments. I would like to create a good answer partly because the customer concerned has been extraordinarily helpful to me in marketing my IMAP products and partly because I would like to gain a better grasp of these matters myself. I consider my technical knowledge of IMAP to be excellent but my cultural knowledge of it is hazy.

I will offer a few ideas that I would include in a response and I invite people to critique them.

Has IMAP been a slow starter? I think it has although it is also true that it is well used in certain quarters.

Is it hard to understand its capabilities intuitively? I think this is true. For example, there are excellent reasons why IMAP includes no facilities for sending messages but those reasons are rather technical and may seem strange to an average email user. I think it may also be difficult to get a grasp of what IMAP can do because of the way that clients implement it. Not that clients should expose IMAP capabilities as such but many clients make poor use of them.

Why has IMAP not caught on more? Many email service providers have no incentive to provide IMAP support. Or is that the wrong way to look at it? Email providers could perhaps do better by offering IMAP as an extra, at a price. But maybe there would be too few takers? I feel strongly that another reason IMAP has not caught on is because of the sorry state of clients. While there are a couple of glowing exceptions, the state of IMAP support in general among popular clients is a disgrace.

Should IMAP catch on more? I think it should and I think it will. The biggest reason that I see is mobility. (My view that this is the biggest reason may be created by the market that I operate in.) When you want to read your mail from a handheld device (be it a PDA, mobile phone, or something else), IMAP is ideal. You can arrange for your mail to be stored in one place and access any piece of it from your device. You can selectively access the various components of a message. You can search folders -- with awesome search power. The trouble is that there is no email client I know of for handheld devices that has anything like a complete implementation of IMAP, never mind one that works very well. (Although I have a wee notion that this situation could change for one particular PDA, the Sharp Zaurus.)

Do I think that imap.org does a good job about getting the word out about IMAP? I have little idea. I am not even sure that that is a purpose imap.org is intended for.

My thanks in advance for any comments,

Pete Maclean

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