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How IMAP works under the hood

(blog.lohr.dev)
236 points michidk | 3 comments | 3/29/2025, 9:05:00 AM | HN request time: 0.607s | source
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therein ◴[3/31/2025, 9:28:00 AM] No.43532935[source]▶

Interesting no attempt has been made to make it at least be less heavy on networked bytes. Especially since it is old and was meant to be used on a connection with no compression or encryption.

HasChildren could have been Parent, HasNoChildren could have been Leaf or Child. And so many more things.

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philipwhiuk ◴[3/31/2025, 10:17:00 AM] No.43533215[source]▶

The protocol has ossified and been entrenched. In general more efficient usage of IMAP relies on extensions to the protocol.

A modern replacement (JMAP) hasn't been adopted by major providers.

If you really cared about data transfer size you'd use something like Protobuf.

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1. FuriouslyAdrift ◴[3/31/2025, 1:51:00 PM] No.43535069[source]▶

JMAP is fully supported (since 2019) for Fastmail

https://www.fastmail.com/dev/

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2. n3storm ◴[3/31/2025, 2:02:00 PM] No.43535193[source]▶

Jmap was developed by Fastmail, meanwhile all primary FLOSS mail servers do not support it and just new projects like Stalwart are starting to bring it up.

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3. FuriouslyAdrift ◴[4/2/2025, 3:18:00 PM] No.43557660[source]▶

Cyrus supports it. https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/developer/jmap.html