Re: Fwd: Re: [Jmap] Fwd: Re: WG Review: JSON Mail Access Protocol (jmap) - reducing configuration complexity

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, February 8, 2017 14:27 +0000 Alexey Melnikov
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
> 
> On 08/02/2017 14:22, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 01:52:00PM +0000, Alexey Melnikov
>> wrote:
>>> Agreed. JMAP and IMAP are likely to co-exist for long time.

>> Isn't that exactly the complaint?  Something like, "Long
>> periods of co-existence need to have lots of benefits or an
>> existential one, or else they're not a good idea."

It is certainly my main complaint.

> They have slightly different audiences. People who want to do
> something like JMAP are already doing something like JMAP.
> They might or might not care about IMAP. People who are doing
> IMAP and not webmail might not care about JMAP.
> It is not yet clear to me that JMAP will replace IMAP. But I
> don't think this is a reason not to let JMAP progress.

Alexey, I think you are missing the point.  Except for the small
minority of users who switch MUAs back and forth (see below), I
would expect any given user to use either an IMAP approach, a
JSON or JSON-like one, or neither.    No long transition as far
as they are concerned.    However, from the perspective of
someone trying to maintain servers or a mailstore, the fact that
there will be both types of users (for a long time if not
forever), it implies the need to maintain (and configure,
support, etc.) both IMAP/SMTP and JMAP facilities in parallel
and to support, also for a long time, the ability to convert
between the two formats.  Also, if that conversion is not
absolutely lossless, there will be a large collection of ongoing
problems, for an equally long time.

Those _are_  reasons to not let JMAP progress because it could
easily make the mail system work worse.  Not, as Andrew (and
several others) have suggested, not a risk we should encourage
unless the benefits and improvements are significant.

     best,
      john