wasm-demo/demo/ermis-f/imap-protocol/cur/1600095008.22595.mbox:2,S

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MBOX-Line: From brong at fastmail.fm Sat Mar 7 15:37:18 2015
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
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: <54FB50B9.8010009@verizon.net>
References: <54FAEB94.4070508@lavabitllc.com> <54FB50B9.8010009@verizon.net>
Message-ID: <1425771438.472600.237334077.6AC8DF41@webmail.messagingengine.com>
On Sun, Mar 8, 2015, at 06:25 AM, Joshua Cranmer wrote:
> 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).
Yeah, I would have been arguing very strongly against this - at least
with the whole "you can't tell the client about expunges" because it
changes sequence numbers problem - because it doesn't interact well with
CONDSTORE and friends, and it requires the server to keep COW state on
the entire mailbox for each connected client.
Of course, I'm not Mark Crispin :) I don't like anything which forces
either end to do more work than it actually needs - and IMAP has a pile
of required work that many clients don't actually use (like the UNSEEN
and RECENT values which aren't used by many clients). There's no way
for a client specify that it doesn't need the server to do the
bookkeeping on its behalf.
Bron.
--
Bron Gondwana
brong@fastmail.fm