MBOX-Line: From mrc+imap at panda.com  Wed May 18 11:44:54 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Mark Crispin <mrc+imap@panda.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:45 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Thoughts on keyword improvements/enhancements
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTikVbKdXg01nnajJ-=XLNfTpjjjG0Q@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20110518011645.Horde.6sTkboF5lbhN03Jd3XNndCA@bigworm.curecanti.org>
	<BANLkTikVbKdXg01nnajJ-=XLNfTpjjjG0Q@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1105181108180.24932@hsinghsing.panda.com>

On Wed, 18 May 2011, Brandon Long wrote:
>> 1. Allowing non-ASCII characters in keywords
> Note this is one of the main reasons we didn't map our labels to
> keywords in the Gmail IMAP implementation.  That, and the majority of
> clients don't really expose keywords to the user in any real fashion.

The problem is that in doing so, you forked IMAP in a way that causes
trouble to compliant clients in this regard, and breaks compliant clients
due to violations of the specification elsewhere.

This is deja vu of Microsoft's 1990s "Embrace, Extend, Destroy". The
difference is that Microsoft's code has more bugs than a Manhattan
basement.  Google, on the other hand, just doesn't seem to care about
compliance.

> We do store keywords as labels which aren't visible in our web
> interface, mostly because IMAP clients rarely used keywords to store
> anything particularly user visible.

That is the case if you define "IMAP clients" as Outlook and Thunderbird.
Yes, I am aware that is the definition as used at Google.

> And this was our eventual solution.  We don't expect clients to
> implement our extensions for this, but since IMAP has become the
> defacto Gmail API, it became necessary to expose some Gmail specific
> data over IMAP for non-traditional applications.

Too bad that the Gmail server is an incompatible and non-compliant fork
that is (at best) barely usable with a standard IMAP client.  This has
obliged most uses of standard IMAP clients to give up on using the Gmail
IMAP server in favor of POP or POP-over-IMAP download/delete.

The extensions are not a problem so much as it is the other things.
However, you could done that functionality within the framework of
standard IMAP, without any extension; and then the functionality would be
used by standard clients without requiring specific knowledge of Gmail.

It just requires creativity and understanding; and the latter requires
experience.  Too bad that Google sacked Brian Reid.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

