Comment by buf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buf | Hacker News Reader

I did a project like this a few years ago and here are my takeaways:

1. Building on top of IMAP is very difficult. It's not a technology that is really designed for the mobile world of today (e.g. streaming, sockets for chat)

2. Threading is a bitch. The old folder tree layout is formidable.

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That said, it's so cool to see something like this in the wild. As an engineer, I would've used this as a boilerplate for my project years ago, and it would've saved me literally six months of efforts.

Kudos to this. It's gods work.

Free startup idea: Use this to help larger businesses collaborate more efficiently (much like if Yammer and GTasks had a baby).

1. IMAP is powerful and ubiquitous, but it does put a lot of work on the client: implementing a parser, caching values, correctly handling unsolicited messages. Switchboard tries to carry some of this boilerplate weight.

2. Yes! We still have to work this into Switchboard, but conversations in the JMAP (http://jmap.io) spec give an idea of how it will be implemented.

It seems to me that this is the startup idea, built on top of this tech.

Seemed to me that it wasn't particularly meant for internal business comms. Just random comms.

Would be a good idea to market it for those two verticals.

Interesting article about message threading:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

That article is a classic, and is used by most people I've talked to implement threading if they can't rely on the IMAP server supporting the THREAD extension [1].

However, it also serves as an example of some of the complexity that clients are expected to handle to provide a modern email experience. That algorithm isn't trivial, and reimplementing it with every client is expensive in development time, and error-prone.

As mentioned in a sibling comment, the Switchboard server's roadmap includes making it thread aware, leaving Switchboard clients lean.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256

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