On: How to Replace IMAP

[viraptor]

There are some good points, but:

1. HTTP / HTTPS - please don't... There are stupid/broken transparent proxies in many places that will effectively block this protocol. Also custom TLS connection gives some hope for domain-specific certificates instead of ip-specific - there is enough problem with them in HTTPS as it is.

3. People still don't know how to set the encoding (or what the encoding is) and will happily send you Greek in latin1 or something equally silly.

4. Would it really work for mailing lists where conversations naturally fork into many branches?

5. IMAP supports labels... even if it's crazy number-based labelling where every client needs to set its own names for the labels. We'd just need to make it not suck this time ;)

So it's not all that bad in IMAP - there are many areas where we can do worse by accident. But yes - it would be nice to have server-side text searching...

[pyre → viraptor]

> 4. Would it really work for mailing lists where conversations naturally fork into many branches?

I agree with this. The idea that messages must be accessed by conversation is a bit much. Support for conversation group could be nice, but ignoring that feature would have to be allowed so that clients could implement their own views.

For example, the following structure would be crappy to force on clients:

  Label
  `-> conversation 1
      `-> msg0
      `-> msg1
  `-> conversation 2
      `-> msg0
      `-> msg1

Needing to iterate through every conversation to pull tease out the full list of messages (in order to use a different conversation-grouping method) would be ridiculous. Not to mention the question of whether or not conversations should span labels and how that should work.