How to Replace IMAP
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How to Replace IMAP
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#2Not to spend too much effort defending IMAP (which does, to be fair, kinda suck) but... come on. It's not that hard. It works just fine, enjoying pervasive support with very high quality clients and servers available freely on essentially all platforms.
A new protocol would be ... prettier, I guess. But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusional.
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#3I can't say whether his implementation makes sense.
Regardless, I would like to see public key encryption of all email. There's no reason why messages should be plain text anywhere except at the two ends.
I realize key management would be a problem, but it's probably a solvable problem. The solution would have to allow most people to be practically unaware of encryption issues.
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#4The description for #8 sounds more like long polling to me. For push email, I'd envision something like registering a location to send notifications to (web hooks).
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#5First the solution doesn't really fulfill all of imaps use cases (especially push mail) but that is unimportant.
What is important is that the IMAP protocol isn't difficult, and I don't think that is what limits "email innovation." It is more so that it has been around since the 70s and email clients haven't been able to remove themselves from their past. It isn't the protocol limiting them from moving forward, it is the shear number of other clients that wouldn't support any of the "innovations" one would try to bring to email.
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#6Not to spend too much effort defending IMAP (which does, to be fair, kinda suck) but... come on. It's not that hard. It works just fine, enjoying pervasive support with very high quality clients and servers available freely on essentially all platforms. A new protocol would be ... prettier, I guess. But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusi…
http://jerakeen.org/notes/2010/01/yay-more-email-clients/
The Android GMail client is a perfect example of what a client looks like in this world. It talks to the (secret / private) GMail API, it does offline mail reading, and queues actions so you can archive / filter / whatever mails while offline and it’ll push changes later. You can read and write mail. It doesn’t try to do anything clever, because anything clever done on one client isn’t reproduced on any other client. And if I don’t have a client on my current computer for GMail, I can use a web browser, and still get all the features of the server. I use the web gmail interface for everything anyway, because it’s better than any GUI client I’ve got.
I dont know - this guy makes for pretty convincing arguments on why email should be done right on the server rather than the client. Which effectively means a new protocol.
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#7Not to spend too much effort defending IMAP (which does, to be fair, kinda suck) but... come on. It's not that hard. It works just fine, enjoying pervasive support with very high quality clients and servers available freely on essentially all platforms. A new protocol would be ... prettier, I guess. But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusi…
This is not about making it easier to write email clients or servers, it's about making it easier to write email apps. Currently, you either have to write a plugin for an email client or interact with IMAP directly. Opening up email to mainstream developers means ditching IMAP/MAPI/etc as the API.
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#8Not to spend too much effort defending IMAP (which does, to be fair, kinda suck) but... come on. It's not that hard. It works just fine, enjoying pervasive support with very high quality clients and servers available freely on essentially all platforms. A new protocol would be ... prettier, I guess. But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusi…
The combination of IMAP and MIME are hard.
Yes, we could be happy with the status quo. But I do believe that one of the things that's holding up innovation around email is the lack of easy access to data. Proposed exercise: Write a script that downloads and displays your Twitter feed. Then write a script that downloads and displays your email. The email exercise will take you an order of magnitude longer.
Spam filtering isn't the problem you make it out to be. I get more spam in my Facebook inbox (mostly viruses) than in Gmail. If you're hosting you're own email or are using a sucky provider, that's a different story.
Email will be hard to replace long-term anyway. I doubt your bigcorp employer really going to let you send work-related Facebook messages. IM is a fundamentally different protocol with different use cases (think async vs. sync, fax vs. phone).
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#9First the solution doesn't really fulfill all of imaps use cases (especially push mail) but that is unimportant. What is important is that the IMAP protocol isn't difficult, and I don't think that is what limits "email innovation." It is more so that it has been around since the 70s and email clients haven't been able to remove themselves from their past. It isn't the protocol limiting them from moving forward, it is…
Would love to hear your thoughts about how to improve my proposed design. My email's on my HP in case you want to do it offline.
Re: How to Replace IMAP
#10The description for #8 sounds more like long polling to me. For push email, I'd envision something like registering a location to send notifications to (web hooks).
Yeah, it is long polling. I could be misinformed, but isn't the problem with web hooks that you might not have ports open and could be behind a firewall?