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Comment by joshfinnie | Hacker News Reader

I am sad that this seems to be Gmail only. Why have developers lost touch with standard IMAP protocols so we can use these new fancy apps with any email provider...

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An unfortunate reality is that IMAP is a really bad protocol. I encourage you to try implementing a client to get a feel for how difficult and quirky the protocol is. (Be sure to try implementing IDLE)

I'd love to see a better base protocol with a clean extension mechanism and a culture of documenting and publishing such extenstions. One can dream :)

EWS (Exchange Web Services) is actually a very good and well-documented protocol built on top of HTTP/HTTPS. Unfortunately, it's Microsoft only, but it's the closest anyone's really come to a "modern" e-mail protocol.

I have to imagine that this relies on an enormous amount of backend processing - and that it is a lot easier to do this with one Gmail backend.

Isn't this just an email client?

If you connect via IMAP, you get all your email as usual. It's up to the client to do things like set calendar reminders from emails or whatever.

That's a good question... I was under the assumption this was for gmail only. I guess I will have to wait for an invite and test it out myself.

The vast majority of my Gmail access is through IMAP, and I'm quite happy for Google to leave that alone. Their tastes are very different from mine, and change more frequently. I would not be happy to wake up one day to find that Google had shuffled my messages, created new folders, and randomly labeled my messages to look like the flag of the world cup-winning soccer team.

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