MBOX-Line: From blong at google.com  Mon Oct 31 14:53:26 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Brandon Long <blong@google.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:46 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] BODY.PEEK[section]<origin.size> FETCH response
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On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Mark Crispin <mrc+imap@panda.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2011, Brandon Long wrote:
>>
>> tsk tsk, haven't I said this before? ?Outlook isn't our primary at
>> all.
>
> 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 have no idea who you talked to, but my team owns the Gmail IMAP server.

As for Outlook, we have a separate piece for that, since we had issues
with their IMAP implementation:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/outlook_sync.htm

Plus, that has the benefit of giving Outlook contacts & calendar sync as well.

As for "behaving like Gmail", we have that issue most definitely.
Almost all of our IMAP users mostly use the web interface, so yes,
they want the IMAP experience to mimic the Gmail interface.  There are
settings that can be set to make the experience more "IMAP normal"
than "Gmail normal", but the defaults favor the more common use case.

> If you think that Gmail's IMAP server is compliant, you are mistaken.

I know its not compliant, we even have a support page where we list
the cases where we explicitly decided against compliance.
Interoperability is a goal, however.  That doesn't mean we want to
force Gmail users to use the IMAP mailbox model, however.

> Should Google's corporate goals ever change to incorporate compliance and
> interoperability, I wish you luck on making it compliant. You have a lot
> of work, and a great deal of testing, ahead of you. You also face some
> very difficult design decisions.

If compliance was important, one would think there would be a fairly
comprehensive suite of tests that one could use to measure that.  The
existing test suite does not meet that goal.

And I argue that we made the design decisions we did with good
reasons.  I also argue that there were no perfect decisions to be
made, and usability was a more important goal than correctness.

> FWIW, "it works with Apple Mail and Thunderbird" does not constitute
> testing. Not by a long shot.

The real world is a harsh place.

Brandon
-- 
?Brandon Long <blong@google.com>
?Staff Engineer
?Gmail Delivery TLM

