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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: 0.33s | 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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philipwhiuk ◴[31 Mar 25 10:17 UTC] 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. Aloisius ◴[31 Mar 25 18:18 UTC] No.43538005[source]▶
IMAP 4rev2 merged in a most of the common extensions into the base protocol. Sadly they left out the THREAD, QRESYNC and OBJECTID, though they reference them.

Of course, major providers like Gmail don't support that as well.