[brongondwana]

Mark Crispin was wrong. The underlying model of IMAP is strong, but a lot of the complexity of mail access comes from clients working around things which are either broken or missing in the protocol.

Their reasons aren't excellent, they are some theoretical notion of purity which leads to things like the "MOVE" capability taking years to finally happen, and everyone implementing copy+store+expunge independently and poorly in the meanwhile.

He's dead now, so he can't tell me I'm a feckless Gen X with no clue how to do real protocols - but there's a reason why proprietary protocols like ActiveSync get traction, and it's not because you need to pay a licence fee - it's because they actually solve problems that need solving.