93 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
93 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
MBOX-Line: From blong at google.com Mon Oct 31 16:14:07 2011
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To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
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From: Brandon Long <blong@google.com>
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Date: Fri Jun 8 12:34:47 2018
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Subject: [Imap-protocol] BODY.PEEK[section]<origin.size> FETCH response
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In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1110311455120.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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References: <8F0DA5FA-FB07-4AFA-9C58-8F0927998343@ghoti.org>
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<alpine.OSX.2.00.1110301823210.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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<CABa8R6uyrHJ6AqQoGfMcLztG-zovaVK4FEFep8ibpYc2-6b7ig@mail.gmail.com>
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<alpine.OSX.2.00.1110311352000.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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<CABa8R6ugaAADsrvaS1Nnau5bi7k9728b+x00NcG1Nbxfk9xwsA@mail.gmail.com>
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<alpine.OSX.2.00.1110311455120.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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Message-ID: <CABa8R6vJGTa+VH-TOgXhCSpX5N1HZTBBqisDhPY9Metz5864JQ@mail.gmail.com>
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On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Mark Crispin <mrc+imap@panda.com> wrote:
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> On Mon, 31 Oct 2011, Brandon Long wrote:
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>>
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>> I have no idea who you talked to, but my team owns the Gmail IMAP server.
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>
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> In that case, at the very least, there is a lack of a consistent and
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> coherant policy regarding standard compliance.
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>
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>> Almost all of our IMAP users mostly use the web interface, so yes,
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>> they want the IMAP experience to mimic the Gmail interface. ?There are
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>> settings that can be set to make the experience more "IMAP normal"
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>> than "Gmail normal", but the defaults favor the more common use case.
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>
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> Do you actually have research and firm numbers to back up the contention
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> that customers want their IMAP clients to behave incorrectly, including
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> malfunctioning, so that some IMAP clients seem to mimic Gmail?
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When we first released IMAP internally, the overwhelming use case was
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as an adjunct to Gmail Web interface, not as a replacement to the
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client. That is expected, of course. But our public usage mimic'd
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this to nearly the extreme. Now, I'm willing to believe that our
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choices informed the usage in some part, but the overwhelming use case
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of Gmail's IMAP interface is access on mobile devices by people who
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use the Gmail Web interface on the desktop.
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> Or is this just a matter of religion that has never been challenged, much
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> less bolstered with research?
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I know the clients which use my service, since that knowledge is
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important to me, even if the ID command is considered pariah to the
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perfectness of the protocol.
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Also see the changes that Thunderbird has made to make their client
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more "Gmail" like when talking to us. Or see the Blackberry Enhanced
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Gmail plug-in which tries to make the Blackberry have a more Gmail
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feel. Or arguments I've gotten in on Google+ with our adoring public
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who wanted us to make the usage even more Gmail like, impossible
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though that was to express in the IMAP protocol.
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>> I know its not compliant, we even have a support page where we list
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>> the cases where we explicitly decided against compliance.
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>> Interoperability is a goal, however. ?That doesn't mean we want to
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>> force Gmail users to use the IMAP mailbox model, however.
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>
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> So, instead, you force Gmail users to use a non-compliant model that
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> violates guarantees in IMAP and causes some IMAP clients to malfunction.
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If we are violating guarantees that cause malfunctions, it would be
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good to know that. The only one I know of is that under some
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circumstances, alpine wants some combination of the header + body to
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equal something, and due to our LF->CRLF shenanigans, that can be
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violated. I'm not happy with it, but I have no good way to fix it,
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either. Whether its an important guarantee, well, it hasn't seemed to
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have affected anyone who removed the check.
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I know also that some of our deletion behavior follows some of the
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"non-suggested" ones from the IMAP best practices RFC, but I didn't
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think doing those was actually non-compliant.
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>> And I argue that we made the design decisions we did with good
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>> reasons. ?I also argue that there were no perfect decisions to be
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>> made, and usability was a more important goal than correctness.
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>
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> Thank you for confirming, in public, that the Gmail IMAP server is
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> non-compliant and that Google has no intention to make it compliant.
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I feel pretty safe in saying that Gmail's IMAP doesn't support
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substring search of bodies and never will, and is therefore
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non-compliant. At least until we can do it for a single user without
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consuming the equivalent resources of a couple million users who don't
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use it.
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Brandon
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--
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?Brandon Long <blong@google.com>
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?Staff Engineer
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?Gmail Delivery TLM
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