MBOX-Line: From Pidgeot18 at verizon.net  Sat Mar  7 11:25:45 2015
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.net>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:53 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] If Crispin were creating IMAP today how would
 it be different?
In-Reply-To: <54FAEB94.4070508@lavabitllc.com>
References: <54FAEB94.4070508@lavabitllc.com>
Message-ID: <54FB50B9.8010009@verizon.net>

On 3/7/2015 6:14 AM, Ladar Levison wrote:
> I thought this might be a good list to ask a simple, but admittedly
> subjective question: If Mark Crispin was creating IMAP from scratch, in
> the world of today, would it still be a line based protocol like it was
> with RFC3501, or would he have gone with something more stateless, like
> a JSON-RPC paradigm, like JMAP?

If Mark was redesigning IMAP today, I imagine it would end up looking 
more or less like IMAP looks today with the biggest changes being some 
IMAP extensions being mandatory and the entire protocol (except message 
literals) being UTF-8.

 From reading his messages in this mailing list, he would focus on 
supporting use cases of clients, but primarily what he thinks a "good" 
IMAP client looks like--unlike many others here, he was fully insistent 
on message sequence numbers being the only right way to do things. A 
stateful, line-based protocol would be far simpler for clients to 
implement (particularly since I also get the impression that he would 
have eschewed needing to use several layers of frameworks).

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth


