John, We have a multi-portal framework where we all started as text only systems and it's been a moving target as a function of the evolution of the client devices, and it continues to be a moving target. There is no IETF "webmail" protocol, like we have for SMTP, POP3, IMAP and NNTP. If you want more control, you offer online or native frontend/apps, otherwise you only have 822/2822/5322 has a common ground for independent 3rd party hosting client tools. When internet mail came, a Preserve MIME option was added. It was default off and the sysop had control. Not the user. All mail was transformed into the native mail storage format, attachment separated. The web ui portal was given view HTML/text only click if the mail was save in preserve mime mode. When users began to roam using pop3, the pop3 server recreated the RFC x822 mail for the pop3 download. No WYSIWYG complaints for many years. Operators set the Preserve Mime option on a case by case basis. Some operators with a higher movement of roaming users, wrote scripts to set the option to true. As HTML, storage issues declined, more online viewing stripping of harmful HTML or images stuff was added, the Preserve Mime option was eventually provided as a user option. But today, it is still off by default. That can change in a future ever evolving update. We also have Preserve Mime options at the conference, mail, network type storage level. So for some NNTP gated emails or list storage areas, it's preserved and in others it's clean up as plain text. Now today, if you had to do this over all again, what will be done? Well, it depends. There is good strategy that simple is better, just do it, no user options, or save it for the future, forget about the stuff that was just candy and never used, etc. Some of the native Mail apps for these smart devices are pretty primitive compared to their PC counterparts. Just look at twitter and these other small footprint, 5% of what you already had reinventions, that are successful. Nothing hasn't really change but the vendor need to single source these multiple portals. It also depends on how performance is needed. Offloading speeds things up. Web based is stil a lot of overhead. HTML5 and web sockets will give us more feel of a native client. >From an IETF standpoint, probably an I-D for an web-based Mail I/O API, then we can properly call it WebMail. -- Hector Santos http://www.santronics.com > On Jun 17, 2014, at 11:51 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > work,