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Re: [MORG] Why IMAP extensions are (not) used
On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, Timo Sirainen wrote:
For traditional desktop
IMAP clients most extensions are worthless.
Completely agree. The only extensions that make a significant difference
for Pine/Alpine are SORT/THREAD and to a lesser extent MULTIAPPEND.
The thing that strikes me with the recent batch of extensions is that they
are all stupid little tweaks that do nothing to enhance functionality.
For mobile clients I guess
many would be valuable in theory, but since the server support for
extensions is (still) so low I have some doubts as to if/when they start
supporting e.g. Lemonade extensions.
I have $100 that says that this is not going to change.
LEMONADE missed its window of opportunity. The LEMONADE extensions are a
joke in the vendor community.
The BIS model makes much more sense for mobile clients than the humungous
kludge tower of LEMONADE. BES makes even more sense for the fully
integrated environment (will IETF get calendaring done before the sun
novas??). You can damn well bet that bean counters like it too.
Windows Mobile and iPhone allow you to consume IMAP/POP directly, and
iPhone's MobileMe is like BES. But I won't be at all surprised if Apple
soon offers an "optional" MobileMeLite BIS service that works much better
(from the end user viewpoint) than directly consuming IMAP/POP.
Anyway, most of the extensions I implement nowadays are going to be used
by webmails.
This assumes that the webmails will consume IMAP. I see plenty of free
webmails that do that, some (e.g., Web Alpine) smarter than others. But
none of the industrial webmails consume IMAP now, or have any intention of
consuming IMAP except as part of a migration tool.
Our webmail doesn't consume IMAP. Webmail and IMAP consume the same
distributed store; there are operations in that store specifically for
webmail, and others specifically for IMAP.
-- 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.