[lemonade] Why we should let the IMAP specification become more rich, rather than poor

[Philip Van Hoof <spam at pvanhoof.be>]

This is a personal opinion.

With Lemonade we finally have the opportunity to improve the IMAP spec
and to let IMAP servers advertise richness of features in a marketing-
meaningful way.

My opinion is that we have seen four kinds of IMAP servers:

- Free software ones that get a lot right
- Free software ones that get most (or at least a lot) wrong
- Commercial ones that get most right
- Commercial ones that are actually trying to sell their closed protocol
  instead, but offer a crippled "old IMAP" interface for marketing
  purposes (we do IMAP too, look at us!)

For several years it was possible to say that for example Google's
recent IMAP server offering is a rather poor IMAP server because
UNSELECT, IDLE, NAMESPACE, QUOTA, XLIST, CHILDREN and something weird
called XYZZY is not really that much of a big deal for a modern IMAP
server ... nowadays.

My guess is that this XYZZY is that item #4 in the list above: XYZZY was
a magic word used in one of the earliest computer adventure games -
Colossal Cavern. It would transport you between two different parts of
the map.

Nowadays you can, however funny XYZZY is, effectively say that Google's
IMAP server is just not a Lemonade-ready IMAP server:

 - No CONDSTORE, no RSYNC
 - No CATENATE
 - No UIDPLUS

Let's hope that for marketing this will be meaningful someday and that
we that way can convince vendors like Google to do a better job.


ps. I don't care how good the extensions behind XYZZY are. Not specified
in an open way means that they don't exist for my E-mail clients. 


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be




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