On 11 Jan 2019, at 12:10, Sam Hathaway wrote:
On 11 Jan 2019, at 14:58, Randall Gellens wrote:
An IMAP-JMAP proxy just moves the complexity of dealing with the
myriad of IMAP servers from core MailMate to an embedded proxy. I
don't see it providing that much help, while it would undoubtedly
introduce its own set of problems.
If coordinated right, it would centralize the thankless work of
kludging around nonstandard, broken IMAP server implementations.
Imagine if, instead of each MUA author having to develop, test, and
maintain dozens of ugly hacks, they were collaborating to improve a
single JMAP proxy codebase that all could use.
That could be a great thing. Or it could be just one more variant for a
client to support, potentially multiple variants if the proxy behaves
differently depending on which IMAP server it is facing. Done well, a
universal proxy could help. But then, done well, IMAP is fine.
As I said earlier, while JMAP might be very cool, it doesn’t help
the core problem of widely variant IMAP server behavior; instead, it
just introduces yet more variants.
It does move us towards solving the problem of IMAP being kinda trash
for resource-constrained clients with slow network connections.
As I mentioned before, IMAP was originally designed for extremely slow
dial-up lines that were prone to sudden disconnection. Many of the
features of IMAP are specifically for the problems of communication in
that environment.
I think it’s telling that many of the major email providers (Google,
Microsoft, and FastMail, at least) felt the need to create their own
proprietary mail access protocols for use by their mobile apps. What
this says to me is that IMAP is not fit-for-purpose when it comes to
smartphone apps.
Maybe, or maybe many of the big providers didn't want to spend the time
to figure out how to do IMAP well, and/or saw competitive advantages of
having their own protocol. There's a long-standing problem of players
big and small doing poor jobs of implementing standards. In some cases,
it was clear that developers read the RFC examples but not the normative
text.
--Randall
_______________________________________________
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
