Re: subfolders if INBOX are created in root dir.
- From: Mark Crispin <mrc@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:37:27 -0700
On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, tinnews@xxxxxxxxxx posted:
I have to say this is why I have never really liked IMAP. The concept
is fine but the implementation is so variable that it just doesn't do
it for me. I want a system which looks the same regardless of what
client I use (the same in layout that is) and regardless of what
server I'm using.
This is a valid criticism. At the time that IMAP was designed, it was important to export whatever existing namespace for email that was out there. IMAP tries, really hard, to be neutral on the subject of namespaces. If IMAP had mandated its own namespace, it never would have gotten off the ground.
There was quite a war between the partisans of UNIX filesystem and netnews style namespaces, and about how hierarchy semantics should work. IMAP was caught in the middle, and had to somehow make these two camps happy AND still be able to export existing namespaces. It was not as bad as the FTP wars (shudder) but was nearly as destructive.
The other war was between the site managers, who wanted to impose a site rule on how names worked that all clients must follow; and client authors, who wanted to impose a client rule on how names worked no matter what the server did. Both sides had excellent reasons for why they were right and the other side was wrong and had to be defeated at all cost.
IMAP got caught in the middle in both wars, even though it didn't want to be in either one. There was a lot of hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing in those days.
The missed opportunity was the advent of the web and the general acceptance of URIs for naming. This was a chance to impose URIs and The One True Namespace. On the other hand, given the above two mailbox namespace wars that were going on, IMAP may not have been able pull off URI standardization. The web, being a new medium, had the opportunity to impose rules before the holy warriors mentioned above knew what happened.
I like Gmail's idea of using one mailbox with smart view that use flag names applied to messages, and otherwise abolishing separate mailboxes. This solves many problems, including search across multiple mailboxes. IMAP has this capability (called keywords) but it was always a poor cousin and poorly implemented compared to separate mailboxes.
Unfortunately, Gmail created its own problems in its implementation...
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
.
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