Re: [imap5] Feature set? - was Re: Designing a new replacement protocol for IMAP

[Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>]

On Thu Feb 16 10:15:04 2012, Adrien de Croy wrote:
> But SRV has issues, not every corporate runs their own DNS (at  
> least not for external).
> 
> 
Well, tough. There is a point at which we have to assume people will  
have to fix things. XMPP services get this fixed pretty quick, and  
mail is a much bigger juggernaut.


> ACAP is great too, but it's another port and set of creds.  And the  
> tie-in between ACAP and other services is probably manual on the  
> back-end right?
> 
> 
What tie-in? ACAP's just a simple store. The enhancement to the  
client is that a sysadmin can preconfigure the clients, and ACAP  
gives a bunch of wacky data inheritance tricks to make this easy.

I wouldn't worry too much about ACAP anyway - even I think it's  
dead-end. The key portions could be slammed into almost any other  
convenient protocol, and it's one case where I think bolting it onto  
an existing protocol makes sense.

This wasn't the case when it was the only viable solution for  
handling address books, mind, and you'd lose the multi-account  
capability, but I think people are basically OK with such things now.


> Xtra is NZ's biggest ISP.  It blocks port 25.  So when I take my  
> laptop home I need to reconfigure it.  At least I know how to do  
> that.
> 
> 
Why would blocking port 25 be a problem? Unless you're running an MTA  
on your laptop, in which case you're presumably savvy-enough to deal  
with the consequences.

> We're techies here, we forget how lost and confused the punters get.

No matter how good the protocols involved are, it comes down to how  
good the deployment and implementations are. The client is the  
punter-facing component, and without good clients you're shot  
whatever you do.

To get "good" clients, you need mind-share, and you'll only get that  
if you start off with the status quo and figure out where to go - or  
if you base on another preexisting framework. Lots of folk are doing  
this very successfully with the web, of course, but I think there are  
other options, too.

All this talk of a boil-the-ocean brave-new-world is great fun, I'll  
be the first to admit, but I really don't see how it gets us anywhere  
useful.

Dave.
-- 
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