[hnlmorg]

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of JSON either but given the clusterfuck of established email technologies, moaning about JSON is a little hypocritical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_b...

[hyhconito]

It's more: we have two clusterfucks now thus might as well use the one we know best.

At least no one tried to use YAML on the wire, so far anyway.

[jeltz]

And that one is JMAP. IMAP is such a huge clusterfuck it is almost impossible to beat it.

[otabdeveloper4]

IMAP is simple and elegant and not a "clusterfuck" at all.

(Source: implemented both serverside and clientside IMAP.)

IMAP is basically a database query language and as such it works as it should.

[brongondwana]

IMAP is both excellent and, annoyingly inconsistent so it's much more of a pain to develop reliable parsers for. I'm pretty happy to use IMAP generally, but I'm also... MODSEQ is wrapped with a () in some places, not but STATUS HIGHESTMODSEQ:

  . SELECT INBOX.Archive
  * 1239 EXISTS
  * 0 RECENT
  * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe)
  * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe \*)] Ok
  * OK [UNSEEN 1221] Ok
  * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1108730350] Ok
  * OK [UIDNEXT 2231] Ok
  * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] Ok
  * OK [MAILBOXID (210306ee-5833-456b-bede-6d04757128b3)] Ok
  * OK [URLMECH INTERNAL] Ok
  * OK [ANNOTATIONS 65536] Ok
  . OK [READ-WRITE] Completed
  . FETCH 1 MODSEQ
  * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] CONDSTORE enabled by FETCH MODSEQ
  * 1 FETCH (MODSEQ (39570709))
  . OK Completed (0.000 sec)

And... the * operator ranges.

  . FETCH 2231:* (UID MODSEQ)
  * 1239 FETCH (UID 2230 MODSEQ (40306872))
  . OK Completed (0.001 sec)

Source: have also implemented both client and server side IMAP, and reviewed RFC9051 very closely.

[jeltz]

So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there? I have tried a lot of clients and nobody has managed an implementstion which is works well in practice.

And it is a pretty bad query language compared to something like SQL.

[otabdeveloper4]

> So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there?

Yes. Regardless of the email protocol, third-party clients will always be horrible as long as corporations view email as their enterprise moat.