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Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

IMAP is a protocol that you can only love if you haven’t had to try to implement it. I say “try to” because there are so many incompatible almost-implementations that you will never actually implement IMAP.

Replacing it with something more sane seems like a good use of time.

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If you want to use JSON and paging but are stuck with regular IMAP servers, you can use https://EmailEngine.app between your app and the mail server.

I'd rather implement IMAP than HTTP, TLS, JSON, and whatever other shit is involved here. All of those points apply to the WWW more than anything else.

No one implements HTTP, JSON, and TLS. There are libraries for every single language imaginable. The more shared parts of the stack, the less wasted effort so you only have to implement the parts specific to sending and receiving email.

> No one implements HTTP, JSON, and TLS.

> There are libraries for every single language imaginable.

These statements are contradictory.

Only if you're insistent on willfully misreading them.

[no application protocol implementer] implements HTTP, JSON, and TLS [because there are well-worn implementations that can just be used for the purpose].

HTTP is a massive standard that takes thousands of man hours to implement. It's not something that "just exists" out there. I guess maybe the intent is that if you don't have Google writing your standard library you shouldn't even be able to check your mail. I'm not a huge fan of IMAP (I wrote a client implementation for IMAPv4 a long time ago) but it's ridiculous that using what amounts to "SMTP for hypertext" as a transport layer is now common practice.

HTTP libraries do "just exist" for every usable language because almost everything is based on HTTP. Its a piece of common platform that someone puts the effort once and then you have opened up almost everything relating to network protocols. Basing your protocol on HTTP now means you have an absolutely huge amount of stuff for free. Error handling, encryption, verification, streaming, the whole set of tooling around hosting HTTP protocols like nginx, load balancers, etc.

I'd challenge you to find a single production suitable language which _doesn't_ have a http library.

TCP/IP is a standard that takes a long time to implement well. I've had to implement TCP/IP exactly once in my career (maybe a couple times more if you count just "lobbing" crafted datagrams), but I've just "used" existing implementations hundreds of times.

Similarly, HTTP is a big standard that takes a long time to implement well. But very few people will have to implement it: they will use existing implementations.

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