Subject: [lemonade] IMAP "Proxy"

From: Randall Gellens <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 17:02:28 -0700

There's been a lot of discussion about how to allow IMAP clients to 
accomplish forward-without-download.  The two main camps could be 
termed "IMAP Push" and "IMAP Pull".  There has been some excellent 
technical debate about the merits and pitfalls of both techniques.

A third approach has been proposed, called "IMAP Proxy".

To the extent that such a mechanism in fact is a proxy for IMAP and 
Submit, it would be invisible to clients, and hence what we are 
really discussing is "IMAP Push" and a potential implementation path. 
To the extent that such a mechanism is not a proxy, it is instead a 
new protocol that subsumes the functionality of both IMAP and Submit, 
and hence allows the chattiness and verbosity of these protocols to 
go away.

While it is awful tempting to start fresh with IMAP and Submit, and 
in fact a lot of problems could be solved this way, it would also 
represent a very significant step, and one would face great 
uncertainty for success.

Earlier in the discussion some of us expressed concern that any 
potential "IMAP Push" mechanism could lead to two separate ways of 
doing message submission: one for IMAP clients and one for all other 
clients (which include POP-only as well as submit-only).  New 
features would then have to be added separately to each submission 
mechanism.  This danger would be several times worse with the "IMAP 
Proxy/IMAP II" approach.  If we go down this path, we'd have to 
officially deprecate IMAP, or else we'd end up with two separate 
mechanisms for doing IMAP-like things: IMAP and IMAP II.

_______________________________________________
lemonade mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/lemonade