I read imap description long time ago, and I know what it does in principle (along with issues itt), but can someone explain what value does it serve today? I have two confusing thoughts.
First, imap seems to be an overkill for a line wider than 64kbps. Texts do not consume much traffic and an entire mailbox can be served easily to everyone. There are some huge mailboxes out there, but messengers have this problem too and they solve it somehow (I suspect trivial &last_date=... from programming tg bots).
Second, and this may be due to bad clients (haven’t seen good however), imap is just sloooow. It doesn’t update instantly, but instead I have to enter every folder and pull down with my finger to update it. It can show outdated messages which I deleted on a pc for ten seconds before it figures out that they were deleted. My guess that it has something to do with an infinite number of roundtrips which this protocol is based on. Occasionally it shows N unread when there is none. Even push notifications fail to work properly most of the time (same server-side issues?) And with all these complications, I still have to download every attachment by finger. How come that heavy sites/forums/boards/messengers always instantly show new data and mail cannot? I know that I can simply use webmail, but wtf?
I’m a developer, but when I see software, I always try to evaluate it from user-only perspective. And from that, mail tech seems simply incompetent. I wish there was a port smtp->tg and tg->smtp, and special per-subj chats, so I could leave all that legacy for someone else to deal with and just talk to them without missing messages or waiting for updates.
(Not even considering mail message formatting, spam mismatches, size restrictions and non-delivery laws)
The slow mail client issue you’re describing is very probably an artefact of how IMAP IDLE is designed; JMAP fixes this design, as explained at https://jmap.io/#push-mechanism.
First, imap seems to be an overkill for a line wider than 64kbps. Texts do not consume much traffic and an entire mailbox can be served easily to everyone. There are some huge mailboxes out there, but messengers have this problem too and they solve it somehow (I suspect trivial &last_date=... from programming tg bots).
Second, and this may be due to bad clients (haven’t seen good however), imap is just sloooow. It doesn’t update instantly, but instead I have to enter every folder and pull down with my finger to update it. It can show outdated messages which I deleted on a pc for ten seconds before it figures out that they were deleted. My guess that it has something to do with an infinite number of roundtrips which this protocol is based on. Occasionally it shows N unread when there is none. Even push notifications fail to work properly most of the time (same server-side issues?) And with all these complications, I still have to download every attachment by finger. How come that heavy sites/forums/boards/messengers always instantly show new data and mail cannot? I know that I can simply use webmail, but wtf?
I’m a developer, but when I see software, I always try to evaluate it from user-only perspective. And from that, mail tech seems simply incompetent. I wish there was a port smtp->tg and tg->smtp, and special per-subj chats, so I could leave all that legacy for someone else to deal with and just talk to them without missing messages or waiting for updates.
(Not even considering mail message formatting, spam mismatches, size restrictions and non-delivery laws)