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Re: [ietf-smtp] Fwd: Request to form a new WG: JMAP

2016-11-09 10:34:48
Op 8-11-2016 om 02:49 schreef Keith Moore:
> I'm not a huge fan of IMAP and it's looking pretty baroque by now, and POP is 
so dysfunctional and ill-suited to mobile devices that phasing it out would make 
sense.   And a completely new protocol might actually be a good idea.   But 
*-over-HTTPS is almost certainly going to be worse than any of the above.
Nobody likes current IMAP, but IMAP v5 never took off.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=imap5

An extensive rework the existing IMAP protocol is a daunting task. Not only
does it require in-depth knowledge of the existing protocol, it requires
considerable knowledge of how that protocol is used.

Like it or not, a key advantage of starting over is that you don't have to
worry about backwards compatibility with anything. You support the set of
features you deem important, and rely on various consistuencies to advocate for
the things they want.

Also the Courier extension for sending email over IMAP also didn't gain much 
traction.

http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/INSTALL.html#imapsend

It's likely it gained no traction because it's poorly designed, to the point of
near-unusabiliy. In particular:

(1) The lack of immediate feedback that a message was actually sent is a
   deal-breaker for both interactive and non-interactive applications.
   SUBMIT servers do go offline from time to time.

(2) The suggestion that (1) can be solved by sending a copy to yourself
   is nothing short of absurd.

(3) The intrinsic incompatibility with how mail clients use Draft folders
   and Outbox is highly problematic.

I recall looking at this some time ago and thinking, "That's a support call
generator for sure."
I note, however, that there have been any number of other specifications for
submit via IMAP, almost all of them better designed than this one but
neverthless all flawed in one way or another, and there has been essentially
zero uptake of any of them. What this says to me is that having two protocols
for access and submit much of a concern for developers as we'd like to think.

More generally, the ability to submit messages to the transport infrastructure
is almost certainly going to be desireable, but in and of itself it's not going
to be the thing that drives adoption.

I still believe that a coordinated push to get a new version of IMAP would
beat stuff such as JMAP.

For better or worse, proposals that rely on some sort of push happening almost
never succeed. And there's a push to develop an alternative to at least IMAP. A
push to revise and clean up IMAP, not so much.

                                Ned

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