--On Wednesday, February 8, 2017 14:27 +0000 Alexey Melnikov
<alexey.melnikov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On 08/02/2017 14:22, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 01:52:00PM +0000, Alexey Melnikov
>> wrote:
>>> Agreed. JMAP and IMAP are likely to co-exist for long time.
>> Isn't that exactly the complaint? Something like, "Long
>> periods of co-existence need to have lots of benefits or an
>> existential one, or else they're not a good idea."
It is certainly my main complaint.
> They have slightly different audiences. People who want to do
> something like JMAP are already doing something like JMAP.
> They might or might not care about IMAP. People who are doing
> IMAP and not webmail might not care about JMAP.
> It is not yet clear to me that JMAP will replace IMAP. But I
> don't think this is a reason not to let JMAP progress.
Alexey, I think you are missing the point. Except for the small
minority of users who switch MUAs back and forth (see below), I
would expect any given user to use either an IMAP approach, a
JSON or JSON-like one, or neither. No long transition as far
as they are concerned. However, from the perspective of
someone trying to maintain servers or a mailstore, the fact that
there will be both types of users (for a long time if not
forever), it implies the need to maintain (and configure,
support, etc.) both IMAP/SMTP and JMAP facilities in parallel
and to support, also for a long time, the ability to convert
between the two formats. Also, if that conversion is not
absolutely lossless, there will be a large collection of ongoing
problems, for an equally long time.
Those _are_ reasons to not let JMAP progress because it could
easily make the mail system work worse. Not, as Andrew (and
several others) have suggested, not a risk we should encourage
unless the benefits and improvements are significant.
best,
john