MBOX-Line: From brong at fastmail.fm  Mon Oct 31 14:33:46 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:46 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] BODY.PEEK[section]<origin.size> FETCH response
In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1110311352000.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>
References: <8F0DA5FA-FB07-4AFA-9C58-8F0927998343@ghoti.org><alpine.OSX.2.00.1110301823210.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com><CABa8R6uyrHJ6AqQoGfMcLztG-zovaVK4FEFep8ibpYc2-6b7ig@mail.gmail.com>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.1110311352000.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>
Message-ID: <1320096826.9022.140660992904397@webmail.messagingengine.com>

On Monday, October 31, 2011 2:12 PM, "Mark Crispin" <mrc+imap@panda.com> wrote:
> I was told specifically, by Google, that Google does not care at all about
> compliance with the IMAP RFCs, but rather that Outlook using IMAP behaved
> like Gmail. I was also told specifically that compliance and/or
> interoperability is NOT a priority at Google.

I can understand their perspective too - for all that IMAP itself may have
been designed for good reasons, and made good compromises for what was needed,
the sum total of every RFC that extends IMAP is a pretty crufty awful mishmash.

I'm actually surprised that no serious attempt has been made to create a
competing protocol that's simpler to implement, at both ends.  I suspect
Google could do it themselves with a bit of cooperation from Thunderbird.

The really filthy way to do it, of course, would be to just straight out
subvert IMAP4 by offering a "capability", which - if present - allowed the
client to send "ENABLE PROTO-X" and then switch totally to talking the
other protocol - allowing a "legacy fallback" mode for clients and servers
that didn't offer it - then add new features just with the new protocol
as it slowly took over.

It would need some killer feature of course, to make it worth the effort
of supporting it.  And something not patented - totally free to implement
or it would have no advantage over just licensing ActiveSync.

Bron.
-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  brong@fastmail.fm


