The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning [LWN.net]

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

Posted Jan 29, 2008 7:47 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
Parent article: The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

Please don't forget about IMAP users.

Things like "Search improvements" in mail clients seem to tend to focus on home-user POP3
users. That's all well and good.

Good IMAP servers like Cyrus IMAPd, however, offer server-side indexed search, and already do
a great job. Additionally, tbird already uses IMAP flags to provide colour labeling of
messages. All it really needs is the ability to invoke a server side search recursively on a
mailbox tree.

I'm afraid that, while "improving" search for POP3 users, server-side IMAP search might be
neglected or made worse than it is. That'd be unfortunate, and it's something that does need
to be kept in mind.

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IMAP and virtual folders

Posted Jan 30, 2008 0:46 UTC (Wed) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link]

Evolution sucks for IMAP. Sadly the competition sucks even more. I deal with several thousand mails per day using Evolution and vfolders and I far too often find myself waiting as Evolution goes off in a trance for no good reason - there is a reason, it has decided to do something silly with IMAP server, it's just not a _good_ reason.

Today I did my semi-annual checkout-if-any-of-the-competitors-have-stopped-sucking-yet. The answer was a resounding "no". I watched sadly as Thunderbird, Balsa and Sylpheed all started downloading message headers 1 at a time from the server, destined to finish some time next year. Kmail was reasonably snappy and seems to actually take advantage of some of IMAP's goodness however searching by "any recipient contains" just got me a while bunch of error messages. It seems it has no idea which kinds of searches are available on an IMAP server.

It really makes me wonder does anyone actually use IMAP or do they just develop the code with test accounts on test servers :(

IMAP and virtual folders

Posted Jan 30, 2008 2:14 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I use Thunderbird with IMAP and it's OK for my needs.  While I agree that most IMAP clients
suck, you have to realize that IMAP as a protocol sucks.  It's really a horrible protocol; the
best IMAP client I know of is "Pine" (or "Alpine") and one of the authors of Pine was the main
IMAP RFC author, so I'd hope he'd get it right!

For Thunderbird 3, I'm not that interested in an integrated calendar.  I would prefer some
kind of tagging mechanism to tag messages (with arbitrary numbers of tags per message) and
then filtering on tags to make virtual folders.

IMAP and virtual folders

Posted Jan 30, 2008 10:39 UTC (Wed) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link]

Yes, I've written a few scripts to do bulk operations in IMAP and it definitely seems like a protocol that just grew and the was documented but that is no excuse for clients doing:

Fetch message 1 header.
Thank you.
Fetch message 2 header.
Thank you.

when they should be doing:

Give me all the message headers.
Thank you.

The same goes for moving/copying messages. IMAP support always seems to be bolted on afterwards

IMAP and virtual folders

Posted Jan 30, 2008 19:01 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

IMAP support always seems to be bolted on afterwards

Sadly, that's true. I can imagine the development going something like this:

"Aaaah! There are all these weird mail stores out there. Let's abstract out a generic mailstore and specialize it for each actual store."

"OK, what can a mail store do? Well, let's look at POP3 and see.."

The generic mail store API is then designed around POP3 and has no idea how to use the more advanced facilities offered by IMAP. :-(