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COI – Chat Over IMAP

coi-dev.org

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Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#61

Post by xDest »

A German newspaper has some more information on that, for example that this is headed by Rafael Laguna of Open-Xchange https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/whatsapp-konkurrent-open...

The aim seems to be to create a system that can replace centralized messenger solutions by allowing use of existing IMAP servers or hosting one yourself. I am not sure if this is correct but the article states that they are already supplying the software for three quarters of all IMAP servers worldwide and seem to be interested in connecting with Google to bring this to fruition.

Pretty interesting read (although only German) but it seems the marketing on this topic may have just started.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#63

Post by alrs »

Arathorn wrote: post #47
lima wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, those bridges work badly and hardly anyone uses them. I had to give up on my attempt at using Matrix as IRC client - it had questionable uptime and some channels even banned Matrix users due to frequent reconnects (on Freenode). Hackint recently shut down their Matrix bridge due to how maintenance-intensive it was (and the fact that it logged all messages in its own database). It's great in theory but imp…

This info is a bit stale - it's true we had stability problems in Freenode until July 2018 (exasperated by their spam issues), but since then it's been pretty stable and the reconnects are considerably rarer than freenode netsplits. It's not perfect, but many people use it fine as a casual IRC client. There are over 24,000 active users using the Freenode bridge in the last month, for instance, so I'm unsure that 'har…

I tried Matrix last month. It's neat, but slow and a little buggy. Recommending it to anyone other than a Matrix developer right now seems a bit of a stretch.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#64

Post by kevinsimper »

The biggest problem with IMAP from my point of view is spam, that is why there is only a couple of email providers in the world, although still decentralized, they trust each other more than any newcomers, which is kind of preventing this initiative.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#65

Post by Mailtemi »

enough wrote: post #52
Mailtemi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat over IMAP seem a bit misleading title. Their proposition is to add additional info in MIME headers. Or later some of them like Message-Id with chat info. So seem more related to MIME and SMTP. A client app can get those headers with different protocols too. MAPI, EWS, JMAP, etc.

We are working on server specs, the idea is that certain functionality like WebPush, WebRTC calls, channels require the servers to support COI.

Do you know, is it going to have a demo/beta server just to play it.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#66

Post by extra88 »

Tepix wrote: post #56
Tharkun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is very difficult to build a decent email client with IMAP Why do you say that? I've implemented a couple of embedded IMAP clients over the years and I always found it pretty OK to work with?

One issue is that not everyone uses IMAP. What's with POP3 users (they still exist) and Exchange users?

It's not unusual for Exchange servers to have IMAP support enabled. Many organizations have bought into Microsoft's subscription model, use O365 for email instead of running Exchange servers themselves, and typically won't disable IMAP access.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#67

Post by mike-cardwell »

comboy wrote: post #31

I really don't like that the client would require full access to your e-mail account. Otherwise it's pretty neat.

That's like complaining that your web browser gets full access to your browsing history, or that your IM client gets full access to your plain text conversations, even when using E2E encryption no less!

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#68

Post by michael-ax »

Aeolun wrote: post #14
kelnage wrote: post #10

"Last but not least, every COI client app can offer a variety of end to end encryption options to keep your communication absolutely private." The fact I had to read quite so far down the page to find this snippet emphasises to me how unimportant the developers of this protocol see E2E encryption to be :( And leaving it to the client seems like a terrible idea, especially if there are options, as then surely it will…

I don’t really understand why or how this is different from your current trust model around email...?

I agree. Fascinating, but its not exactly 'Signal' (end-to-end encryption with perfect forward secrecy) over IMAP. That would be something I'd jump on, fwiw.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#69

Post by Zash »

Arathorn wrote: post #29

> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this t…

The XMPP-IRC bridge Biboumi is great tho, https://biboumi.louiz.org/

But any bridge will be restricted to the lowest common denominator, often you get into weird corner cases where the two ends of the bridge work subtly different.

A Telepathy dev wrote a long post on the subject a while back, worth reading: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-Sept...

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#70

Post by kilburn »

AnnoyingSwede wrote: post #58

"COI uses an email address and any IMAP server as its infrastructure. This means it can already connect 3.8 billion users - anyone with an email address" Email IMAP even though most email providers do provide access to IMAP, this is greatly oversimplified.

If I understood it correctly, only your side needs IMAP.

From there outwards the protocol (degrades to/can use) regular mail/smtp, so you can indeed connect with any address capable of receiving email.

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