Re: [Imap-protocol] If Crispin were creating IMAP today how would it be different?

Ladar Levison <[email protected]> Sat, 07 Mar 2015 10:10:19 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.mail.imap.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 3/7/2015 8:34 AM, Dave Cridland wrote:
> But in the world of today, the elephant is that the bulk of mail is
> under the control of a handful of huge providers, and a guy working in
> a university lab somewhere is pretty unlikely to have the chance to
> make any kind of difference, and probably wouldn't be interested.
> Mark, in his twenties, tended to solve practical problems that he
> encountered, like telnet issues, roaming mail users, etc. Those
> problems are already solved, so I suspect he'd be solving some
> entirely different problem today, like WebRTC signaling, or practical
> end to end crypto, or secure file sharing, or heaven only knows what.

If all those big providers were using POP, and he wanted to solve a
problem, like mobility, would he have approached it differently? From an
abstract standpoint, the programming language doesn't matter. IMAP is a
protocol that can be implemented in any language, which holds true for
JSON protocols as well. They are simply schemes for stateless
client/server interactions (stateless because they have to go over HTTP)
and which happen to use JSON as the serialization scheme. They could
just as easily have used SOAP/XML.

I'm wondering if the future of mail protocols is to continue improving
the line based protocols we have, or will they be replaced by something
that is friendly to the web? Were seeing a number of vendor specific
mail protocols already, and I'm wondering if convergence is in our
future? In other words, if someone were to start working on a new
protocol today, should they focus on the old line based scheme, or
switch to the newer stateless, JSON paradigm common to the web?

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