> Interesting no attempt has been made to make it at least be less heavy on networked bytes.

Kind of a surprising observation given the first spec (IMAP2) was released in 1998, when dial-up was still a thing:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1064

IMAP4 was in 1994:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1730

ITU V.32 gave us 9.6 kbit/s in 1998, and V.34 was 28.8 kbit/s in 1994:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme...