[cursork]

I'm a big proponent of everything-behind-http because of the way it introduces a common language for integrating disparate services.

However! as someone who has had to debug some particularly gnarly email issues in the past I really do quite like the ability to telnet into an IMAP server to dig around. I also have an appreciation of some of the more horrific things that can go wrong...

So my point is that I'm not sure I agree with "generally much easier to work with than IMAP" - there's two types of "working with". One is building a new client/server from scratch - I'd agree this might be easier, but not something that is done that often. The other is being able to quickly investigate issues with hand-crafted queries, and unfortunately I'd say a simple plain text question-answer interface is better - and here IMAP wins.

Maybe I'm just getting old - it's probably true that almost everyone is happier with HTTP than "telnet-able" protocols (SMTP, IMAP, Redis, etc.) nowadays.