MBOX-Line: From brong at fastmail.fm  Wed May 18 21:58:51 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:46 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Thoughts on keyword improvements/enhancements
In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1105181519330.24932@hsinghsing.panda.com>
References: <20110518011645.Horde.6sTkboF5lbhN03Jd3XNndCA@bigworm.curecanti.org>
	<BANLkTikVbKdXg01nnajJ-=XLNfTpjjjG0Q@mail.gmail.com>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.1105181108180.24932@hsinghsing.panda.com>
	<20110518210716.GA12636@brong.net>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.1105181519330.24932@hsinghsing.panda.com>
Message-ID: <20110519045851.GA23466@brong.net>

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 04:15:19PM -0700, Mark Crispin wrote:
> On Wed, 18 May 2011, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> >What annoys me the most is no CONDSTORE/QRESYNC support, so you
> >can't create an efficient gmail client - you need to sync all the
> >flags, every time.  Gmail is big enough that I'm fairly willing to
> >special case it in exchange for big performance wins, but there's
> >just no way to be sure you have all the changes.
> 
> This serves to illustrate the overall problem with synchronization, and
> specifically with synchronizing email.
> 
> Email synchronization is a fool's errand; but there seem to be an abundant
> supply of fools that undertake it.

God yeah, because - y'know, people WANT it.  There's two approaches to
that.  Rail against the stupidity of people, or accept that just, perhaps,
it might be OK for people to want things.
 
> Thus we have miserable mobile device email clients such as Mail.app on the
> iToy, BlackBerry, and the default Mail app on Android.  At least Android
> has k9mail which - just barely - steps over the line into "usability".

Barely is right.  A search that could find emails older than yesterday
would be nice.

> A special place in hell exists for the authors of synchronizing email
> clients that refuse to display email unless there's a session open to the
> server...

Agree.

> All in the name of the holy religion of "email users won't tolerate
> waiting for the network/not being able to access mail without network
> access."  Hello kids, ever hear of webmail?

I don't know about you - but I'm using offlineimap+mutt as my email client
on my laptop precisely to avoid all this nonsense.  offlineimap speaks a
very minimal IMAP protocol and does the great evil of email synchronisation
(more fool me) so that I can actually access all my email when I'm, y'know,
OFFLINE.  I find myself benefiting from that multiple times per month
despite theoretically having mobile access everywhere.  And it's all on an
SSD, so searches are stupidly fast even if I wind up doing body scans.

Besides I'm not sharing my IO queue with 5,000 other connected users when
I go to actually access my email.

The downside of offlineimap is, as Brendan pointed out for gmail's case,
a 100k message mailbox will cause 6Mb of traffic just to synchronise flags,
because there's no way to say "tell me what changed since last time".  At
least I'm running a patched copy that has COMPRESS support.
http://github.com/brong/brong-offlineimap/ - it's pretty old now, but the
compress support makes it worthwhile.

> Sadly, as the only money to be made in email today is in making email NOT
> work, not in making it work, it's not likely that we'll see much change in
> the status quo.

The money is in making $FOO work the way users want, rather than telling
them what to want.  Unless you have a huge advertising budget it's much
easier to sell people something they already think they want than to make
them want something you would prefer to sell.

Bron.

