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Comment by lake_vincent | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. My company uses Google Workspace, and I find the Gmail UI/UX absolutely unbearable in every way. I personally like Outlook (or rather what it used to be), and just wish for a clean Outlook for Gmail integration.

But the nightmare that is IMAP has prevented me from ever succeeding in cleanly integrating the two. In fact, the general experience of using Microsoft and Google products together is quite frustrating. I get that they are competitors, but not acknowledging the multi-platform reality of modern work and forcing me to suffer because you can't be healthy adversaries, is really ridiculous and I resent both companies for their user-hostile practices.

Looking at you too, Apple.

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As much as Google Workspace email feels convenient, they have sort of broken the IMAP with the label system. Syncing to conventional email clients without label feature just creates multiple copies of emails if they have been labeled with more than 1 label. It is frustrating sometimes

Ideally, Google, MS, etc would deprecate IMAP and replace with JMAP.

https://jmap.io/software.html

JavaScript, embedded, in email is, pejoratively, a bad idea by putting too much power into a transmitted email.

Too many security holes, discovered and undiscovered with JavaScript, not to mention JMTP.

Better yet,

Hashing the local part of the email address and retrofitting mail clients to do the mapping and rejection is the best way to delete unwanted and unsolicited emails.

Couple that with new decentralized lookup of sender’s PKI (as well as DKIM).

That should add years/decades to SMTP viability and usability.

> JavaScript, embedded, in email is, pejoratively, a bad idea by putting too much power into a transmitted email

The exploits writers would like to politely disagree. /s

I was under the impression JMAP was just a sync protocol and had nothing to do with js in email. Is that incorrect?

JMAP is not JavaScript embedded in email. Are you thinking of something else?

But it does nothing to prevent JS in its payload.

the client should be responsible for not executing embedded JS in a message

sure, but that's not a feature a protocol should have. Because the protocol itself does not interact with it in any way. It's clients that process that javascript and execute it. The protocol is about moving 'emails' from one place to another. If you don't want javascript in your email and run your own email stack you can certainly filter out javascript blobs if you want. Or you can chose clients that disable or simply don't even know what javascript is.

While it is a bit late to close the door on JS usage within SMTP protocol, choices of client SMTP becomes paramount given its legacy stage of SMTP protocol.

again, the protocol should be dumb, its a way to move bytes. If there is js encoded in those bytes the rotocol will not and should not know or care. It's up to a client do decide what it wants to do with the bytes it receives.

I can also put JavaScript in a DNS TXT record; the protocol does nothing to stop that!

There is no "JavaScript" in JMAP in the sense that it's supported by the protocol, and the specification explicitly warns against email clients interpreting JavaScript.

Now you are getting the idea of how to design a new network protocol in contrast to adding the supporting numbers of parsers and validators.

Potential and actual vulnerabilities explodes, like the chronic problems of Microsoft Macros.

You cannot read this email until you disable your adblocker.

Why?

IMAP is antiquated and suboptimal with today’s clients and use cases.

That sound more like fud than fact. Van you back that up?

Even a cursery look into my languages Wikipedia notes that IMAP compared to JMAP is statefull and verbose which causes problems with mobile clients. Can you do some research on your own?

Kinda disagree with that. IMAP Idle works just fine for mobile.

https://jmap.io/index.html (Scroll to FAQ: Why is JMAP better than IMAP?)

Very trustworthy coming from the site that advocates that protocol. But I agree with some points.

You still send data through a TCP port, there is not much difference. Yes the protocol is in itself different, but that's expected - it's a different protocol after all.

We might need a protocol update, but many mail providers disabled IMAP for non-premium users already because they tried to force people to use shitty web apps.

Let's be honest, it's IMAP that sucks bad. What neolithic shit is it that a single letter can't exist in multiple "folders".

Does the Outlook Sync Tool work for you?

It has it's own quirks, but you don't have the Google IMAP weirdness.

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/171710?hl=en

Jup. Even using thunderbird with a gmail account it's not great. Google insists on displaying my emails in multiple locations; among others, sent emails show up in the default inbox folder. WTF google?

Anyhow, I am so happy I recently took the time to set up thunderbird for my gsuite account at work. I've been using thunderbird for a long time privately and the UX is just so much better than gmail, it really improved my quality of life during work hours.

It's not that Google insists, it's that IMAP is antiquated and JMAP doesn't fix it either. Same letter in multiple "folders" should've been added to IMAP/JMAP aeons ago.

So why didn't google add it to IMAP when they added the feature to their mail system? There is no point in clients adding support for label-like folders if there is no server using that extension including the servers that do actually have labels. Gmail on the other hand is big enough that by now most non-Outlook clients would have picked up support.

Because IMAP is not theirs to dictate.

Maybe if someone standardised such an extension they'd add support. Considering how ossified email is, they rightfully have little interest to do it alone.

I want to like Outlook, even on my Mac. But it doesn't handle quoting in replies the way I want it to, and I have several correspondents whose email chains get heavily into replies to replies.

I mostly use Apple Mail, which is acceptable, if not great. I guess I need to look at Thunderbird (which I haven't looked at since I've been using a Mac) and, maybe, Vivaldi.

I don't really understand corporations using gmail. Don't you have fears that your company secrets get leaked? Perhaps that isn't an issue for software but I would not be so sure.

AWS does industrial espionage, Google probably does too... Not that the encroaching reliance on Microsoft is much smarter...

It's simply not a concern. Google weaponizing Gmail against competition would be the biggest self-own the company could possibly undertake. Overnight they'd lose the trust of corporations in general, which would cost them the enterprise business, the Cloud business, and a non-insignificant chunk of the ads business.

Google is desperate to find a revenue tent-pole that even approaches the value of ads, and they've bet heavily on that tent-pole being Cloud. Any short-term gains they could acquire from cracking open a user's email would be dwarfed by the long-term losses from ruining their reputation as a reliable keeper of secrets, and they need that reputation to trade in the Cloud space at all.

Maybe. AWS very likely did spy on customers. They met with startups and let them use their infrastructure. Then they launched their own service. They also host data centers for UK spy agencies. Industrial espionage is one of the largest field for these agencies. Doesn't have to be a chip like the Chinese used. And you wouldn't know anyone spied on you.

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