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How IMAP works under the hood

(blog.lohr.dev)
230 points michidk | 1 comments | 29 Mar 25 09:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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therein ◴[31 Mar 25 09:28 UTC] 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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zaik ◴[31 Mar 25 10:41 UTC] No.43533375[source]▶
Despite people always complaining about their perceived inefficiencies, standard protocols like IMAP or XMPP always seem to work on a crappy connection, when most of the modern web doesn't.
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1. Loudergood ◴[31 Mar 25 14:01 UTC] No.43535181[source]▶
Back in the day when I worked at a WISP with 2.4Ghz mountain top antennas the one thing that would work when we were having massive icing issues was email. It was very impressive how it would get through even with massive packet loss and transfer rates measuring in bytes per second.