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When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

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Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#161

Post by billpg »

megous wrote: post #152
Avamander wrote: post #3

I get the impression that the article's author didn't really read the linked help page. It's basic auth that's getting deprecated, due to being considered a legacy authentication protocol. For good reasons, as described. That aside, POP should really be considered legacy, it comes with many downsides that hinder people's e-mail usage. IMAP is definitely more functional, but has a successor - JMAP. So in some sense, i…

What downsides POP3 has? Looks like a terribly simple protocol and does the job of moving messages from one place to another quite well for me. Having to use anything more complex would be a downgrade. More complex to setup on server and client side, with more options and more problems to take care of. I like to use the simplest tool for the job.

The UIDL command is specified as an optional command, but it's really required. https://billpg.com/pop3-uidl/

The workload required to poll is heavy. You need to reconnect TCP, TLS and login. Once you find you have no messages, you have start over to check again. https://billpg.com/pop3-commit-refresh/

Clients and servers need to keep a short-term "message id" to long-term "unique-id" map. https://billpg.com/pop3-message-ids/

Deletes are batched and only committed at the end of a connection. Unless you're willing to close and reopen a connection right away, any messages you delete are in a not-quite-deleted limbo until you close the connection. https://billpg.com/pop3-deli/

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#162

Post by yardstick »

gernb wrote: post #144
yardstick wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more important question is why are you still supporting this ISP by being their customer?

could be on airport wifi, store wifi, cafe wifi, hotel wifi, etc... https prevents them injecting shit

Sure, but this was in specific reference to “My ISP”. I can understand no choice in a hotel/cafe/etc. But there’s now lots of choice for home internet. Wired, cellular, even Starlink.

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#163

Post by Semaphor »

belorn wrote: post #150
Semaphor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and for 365 users, unless you got one of the more expensive accounts intended for large companies, then no custom domain names for your email unless you use Godaddy as registrar I guess that’s US only? With 5 employees we are a pretty small company and this is not the case for us.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize... "At the moment, we only support connecting domains managed by GoDaddy with Outlook.com" In my market those accounts were also marketed towards small companies, with only Microsoft 365 Business tiers and above having the feature of allowing other providers than godaddy as domain registrars. You can also read about it here in the press release: https://new…

Ah, we have a business account, that explains it. I also confirmed that it’s the same in the German copy of the text ;)

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#164

Post by welterde »

nailer wrote: post #151

TLDR: when IMAP didn't standardize push, and when people started to use HTTP for everything. JMAP is the current hotness.

IMAP IDLE exists since 1997 (RFC2177) and works decent enough for single mailboxes. It is limited to only a single mailbox however, which is not quite ideal if one does server-side filtering (as one then needs N connections for N folders). But for that there is IMAP NOTIFY (RFC5465) since 2009, which covers all remaining use cases..

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#165

Post by magicalhippo »

megous wrote: post #159
Avamander wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God forbid you actually have functioning token rotation and revocation alongside 2FA. So insecure. /s

What does oauth have to tho with authentication (let alone 2FA)?

Besides being used for authentication?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/...

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#166

Post by rexreed »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #156
bayindirh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lack of HTTPS on the author's site also adds a nice subtle flavour to the blogpost. If you're not doing anything requiring security, you don't need HTTPS, IMHO. > POP should really be considered legacy I know people who knowingly use POP to keep their remote boxes empty, and keep everything local, so I don't think we should decide for people that swiftly. Similarly, I'll let the wisdom of "Teh Internetz" to decide…

> I know people who knowingly use POP to keep their remote boxes empty, and keep everything local, so I don't think we should decide for people that swiftly. That could be done using IMAP as well. The overhead for that use case seems quite small. However it is just one protocol to support. And I haverun into a bunch of non-techy users with problems like "if i read my mails on my desktop I can't access them on my phon…

In what way can you configure IMAP to not leave messages on the server and yet still give multiple clients access to that email?

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#167

Post by qwerty456127 »

HelloNurse wrote: post #140
qwerty456127 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now or then, whatever the bandwidth or latency, why couldn't we just use a REST web service which would let a client access whatever the parameter incl. mailbox size, list the messages, read the messages in form of JSON/XML arrays of metadata + message bodies in Markdown format?

Because without a standard protocol they would be N underspecified proprietary variants: the Gmail web service, the Office 365 web service, the Office 365 from last year web service... All of them with complicated authentication requirements, idiosyncratic URL construction, and other difficulties. You would throw away the baby and keep the bathwater.

I meant a standardized REST protocol. Why does it have (or ever had) to be something obscure like SMTP/POP3/IMAP if it could be just REST (still standardized, name it whatever)?

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#168

Post by weird-eye-issue »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #138
murderfs wrote: post #136

Ignoring authentication, POP and IMAP truly are legacy protocols in the sense that they were designed in an era where bandwidth, not latency was the major constraint for accessing email. It made sense to send a notification that the size of your inbox changed, and let the client decide whether or not to fetch your emails. Since then, internet connections have gotten tens of thousands of times more bandwidth, but the…

Now or then, whatever the bandwidth or latency, why couldn't we just use a REST web service which would let a client access whatever the parameter incl. mailbox size, list the messages, read the messages in form of JSON/XML arrays of metadata + message bodies in Markdown format?

There are Google and Microsoft APIs for exactly this. Well not markdown exactly but since emails are not sent in markdown it would be kind of subjective exactly how to properly convert it

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#169

Post by weird-eye-issue »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #167
HelloNurse wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because without a standard protocol they would be N underspecified proprietary variants: the Gmail web service, the Office 365 web service, the Office 365 from last year web service... All of them with complicated authentication requirements, idiosyncratic URL construction, and other difficulties. You would throw away the baby and keep the bathwater.

I meant a standardized REST protocol. Why does it have (or ever had) to be something obscure like SMTP/POP3/IMAP if it could be just REST (still standardized, name it whatever)?

Hard enough to get people within the same company to agree on something or use consistent API conventions...

Heck you'd probably have a hard time just getting people to agree to use REST. "Why not GraphQL?"

Re: When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

#170

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

Meph504 wrote: post #103
johnklos wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked help page doesn't make up for what the letter says. The letter is just plainly misleading. Read it again - they're unambiguously saying that non-Microsoft email programs that rely on SMTP, POP and/or IMAP will "stop functioning when Microsoft chooses to disable these protocols". That the linked help clarifies a little doesn't mean this is a flatly misleading letter.

That letter isn't from microsoft though, I manage several tenants, and none of our end users or admin got that letter. specifically what is missing, is that email using basic auth won't disconnected OCT 1st because of the tons and tons of machine that do things like email faxes, and scans that do not support modern authentication. This looks like whoever "enterprise services" is, they wrote a brief message that wasn'…

We split off any of our "legacy" devices to SMTP2GO accounts.
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