> Gmail’s implementation was slightly crippled
Gmail is not "crippled". A tiny but vocal community of old nerds have a petrified mental model of email that they associate with unix IMAP software from the 1990's, but those concepts do not appear in the IMAP standards anywhere.
That is an immature view on how real products and real standards work. The standard document may say one thing, but what people do in the real world is the real standard.
For context: I spent 11 years at Intel managing pre-silicon and post-silicon processor validation. No processor that does only and exactly what the Programmers Reference Manual says, and takes the phrase "undefined behavior" seriously, will be successful. Google would do well to adjust their philosophy.
If history has taught us anything, it's that Google is happy to willfully ignore, rewrite, and use their market dominance to snuff out any existing standards if they see a way to seize control and make money off something.
Absolutely, but in the context of IMAP, it's already a mess of special cases. Gmail having a weirdness, an extension or two changes basically nothing. Not to mention the fact that what they offer over the web is more flexible than what IMAP usually allows, it simply does not and can not map directly to IMAP.
It's really dumb that one message has* to exist in only one location for example, labels are so much better.
It's been an odd running theme for me today that I've misinterpreted posts. Up until your final sentence, I thought that the thesis of your post was:
The standard document may say one thing, but what people do in the real world is the real standard. If your software has issues with the world's most popular IMAP server, you need to adjust your software to be compliant with the standard.
I'm personally more sympathetic to your actual conclusion, but it's odd how often a single argument can be used to support two conflicting beliefs.
Yeah, agreed! I titled my guide "Practical IMAP" for reason (and almost called it "IMAP As She Is Spoke"). The standards are useful to a point, but actually to jeffbee's point the internet has evolved a lot since then, and how to actually work with modern email is a pretty underdocumented - including by Google themselves on the Gmail-specific parts.
If an x86 implementation was imperfectly compatible with Intel CPUs, nobody would buy it. Gmail, on the other hand, is a massive market success. It is those who shout that IMAP must be exactly and only whatever mutt+uw was doing in 1997 who are on the wrong side of history.
It's a free email account, it is not at all clear that "weird IMAP" is core to that success?
Certainly I moved away to Fastmail, which has better IMAP support (but mostly because Google having full control of my email address was becoming too big of a risk and Google Apps is expensive for your own domain).
My memory is hazy on it, _but_ from memory, there were some issues around IDs and persistence which don't occur on other servers, as well as the auth being a bit funky. (Gmail also uses its own extension to the protocol for IDs instead of using eg OBJECTID.)
To be clear, I have no opinion on IMAP or what things _should_ do; I certainly was not using IMAP software in the 1990s :) However, trying to implement a client that works across providers does mean trying to operate per the standards, which was a struggle and why I started documenting it :)
> Gmail also uses its own extension to the protocol for IDs instead of using eg OBJECTID.
When was OBJECTID introduced and when did gmail roll their own implementation, do you happen to know?
Which concepts are you referring to?
RFC 9051 says that it was "developed for" RFC 822 and that one should now refer to RFC 5322 instead. And RFC 5322 does discuss threading, which is the what the comment you're replying to was talking about, so that concept does appear (by reference) in the IMAP standards.
Are there other parts of the community that implement IMAP using the same "mental model of email" that Gmail is using? Or are you saying that anyone using IMAP with anything but Gmail is an old nerd and a tiny minority?