[cyphar]

I will preface this by admitting my only direct experience with IMAP as a protocol was with writing a few scripts to synchronise mail and having to fix bugs in the IMAP libraries I was using.

I must be missing something obvious -- how is IMAP a push protocol? All experiences with IMAP I've had are in the form of basic request-response flows.

Also, regarding JSON floats, most languages have the ability to give you errors if you encounter a float in a JSON field that is meant to be an integer. So it really shouldn't matter at all that JSON's floats are awful. I haven't looked, but does JMAP use floats?

I don't particularly love HTTP nor JSON, but if that's the only problem with JMAP then it's such a massive improvement over IMAP that we should have started switching to it yesterday.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

Basically all IMAP servers found in the wild support IDLE:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2177

[raimue]

The problem with IDLE is that it requires one TCP connection per folder you want to watch. The better alternative is NOTIFY, but in my experience, it is not as widely supported by server and client implementations.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5465

[bjourne]

But that is an extension so you cannot count on it being there. Thus a well-written client would need to handle servers that do not support IDLE. The X11 protocol is similar in that it has a lot of extensions that are theoretically optional but de facto required to deliver a good user experience. It makes implementing such protocols complex because you need to duplicate code paths, one for when the extension is present and one for when it isn't.

[693471]

IDLE isn't sufficient which is why Lemonade was defined

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5550

[dboreham]

Except AOL and Yahoo.

[isodude]

The IDLE-command must be a push type of command? Which is used heavily by clients instead of polling.

As Microsoft does it with RPC is just a mess, they do a http call with 2billion bytes in request size, let the connection terminate at timeout and fire up a new call. I for one hope not that this is how JMAP solves it :(

[Mailtemi]

If submit an app to Apple with IDLE support I would bet will be rejected. JMAP has PushSubscription which will play nice with Apple / Google push services.

[heavenlyblue]

JMAP doesn't solve it at all.

[chrismorgan]

Sure it does. See https://jmap.io/#push-mechanism