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How IMAP works under the hood

(blog.lohr.dev)
235 points michidk | 1 comments | 29 Mar 25 09:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.229s | 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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FuriouslyAdrift ◴[31 Mar 25 13:51 UTC] No.43535069[source]▶
JMAP is fully supported (since 2019) for Fastmail

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

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n3storm ◴[31 Mar 25 14:02 UTC] 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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