Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop [LWN.net]

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 1, 2007 14:27 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141)
Parent article: Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

From the article:

> A Yahoo! Mail or GMail have completely won in the consumer market over
> Thunderbird/Evolution type mail, and are in the process of moving into the
> enterprise.

Does anyone have the numbers? I find it startling to consider that people would rather use the web browser than some IMAP client for their email. IMAP clients must really be poorly made to lose against the browser, which suffers from plenty of handicaps and only one advantage: being accessibly anywhere there is a browser.

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 1, 2007 15:07 UTC (Mon) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

> IMAP clients must really be poorly made to lose against the browser

I don't think it's so much that they're poorly made but that you have to configure them before you can do anything with them.

> which suffers from plenty of handicaps

all of which are acceptable to everybody but sysadmins and power users.

[ Note: I don't agree with the sentiment but I can see where it's coming from ]

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 1, 2007 15:31 UTC (Mon) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link] (2 responses)

Basically, "Web applications" aren't just a desktop application rewritten in HTML and JavaScript. They have fundamentally different properties; compare Flickr versus gphoto or F-Spot.

In the particular case of email, I've found that GMail search (because it runs in the data center) makes a significant difference in my experience versus Evolution or Thunderbird; the latter two basically being unusable.

Anyways, there's plenty of stuff on the web about this. Just a random link, here's a 2001 essay from Paul Graham on how web applications change things:

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 1, 2007 19:58 UTC (Mon) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]

I'm kind of surprised that you find search in Evolution/Thunderbird unusable. Where I'm currently working we're using Google Apps, so all mail accounts are Gmail accounts; except I'm accessing my mail using POP so I can use Evolution. With 30000+ emails (around a gigabyte), search in Evolution is still about as fast as searching in Gmail, except that I find it a bit easier to do searches in Evolution because you can search using more criteria. If I use tracker to search my mail, I get comparable functionality to Gmail's search, but it's a lot faster than either Evolution or Gmail.

I think the biggest advantage that Gmail (or other web mail services) have over conventional email clients is that they seem to have a better UI. I prefer Gmail's "conversation view" to the conventional threaded display in Evolution or Thunderbird, and I also think that Google made a wise decision by just going with labels rather than having conventional folders plus search folders, since labels are just as expressive and provide a uniform interface to mail. There are also small other ways in which the Gmail UI is more innovative (and I think better), like showing text snippets after the email subject, showing you who has replied in the thread (and approximately what order), etc.

Of course Gmail is still lacking in enough areas (specifically good support for mailing lists, and more fine-grained filtering options) that I am using Evolution as my primary mail client. But with the recent rumors that Google is about to roll out a new version of Gmail, that might change...

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 3, 2007 11:06 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Maybe searching is fast, but when I have to use webmail, I always found the latency too big. I mean, webmails are just way too slow to e.g. open a message.

Bye,NAR

Interview with Colin Walters about the online desktop

Posted Oct 2, 2007 8:13 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

> I find it startling to consider that people would rather use the web browser
> than some IMAP client for their email.

For every entity that offers secure IMAP+TLS access, you have 30 offering some kind of webmail. IMAP has not lost on the client side but on the server-side - most mail provides just jumped from pop to webmail without even trialing IMAP.

Mail providers just live webmail, they can stuff it with adds, they can integrate spam filtering easily, and they don't need to explain users how to configure all the different mail clients out there (this bit is an indictment of mail rich client config UIs, and of the de-emphasing of IMAP in big enterprise clients like outlook and notes)

IMAP's real problem was scale and timing

Posted Oct 2, 2007 11:15 UTC (Tue) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem IMAP had initially was scale.

POP3 is really simple as a protocol, and scales well. But more importantly, POP3 tends to assume (in most client defaults) that mail will not remain on the server. IMAP doesn't, and therefore increases storage use and associated costs.

Back then storage space on large mail servers was a serious issue. The machines weren't all that capable, and solutions like SANs were exotic and expensive.

By the time the machines became mature enough to handle IMAP accounts, the market wanted webmail rather than IMAP, as it doesn't tie you to a machine. (Although it does tie you to a browser.)

Ironically, from what I've seen many of the webmail implementations out there are actually based on having data served from an IMAP server, albeit one that's only accessible on the loopback address or behind a firewall you can't access...

I agree with your client config point 100% - IMAP is not thought of as a viable option for most enterprises though, so it's only to be expected. To be honest, I think it was only added in the first place for the education sector, as some large universities used it.

I couldn't figure out why someone didn't just pick this market up buy the scruff of its neck and provide a simple {XML|CSV} file format that was open and freely licensed, and could be read by your mail client to configure itself for you. Then configuring a mail client could literally be as simple as "click on this link, then type your username and password"...

But I still don't think that would have changed things much... Webmail, once used, has a certain accessibility that's far more attractive to light users than a more restrictive rich client will ever be...

IMAP's real problem was scale and timing

Posted Oct 2, 2007 19:09 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

The biggest problem is the IMAP protocol. When have you ever used an IMAP client that just worked 100%? Never! Every IMAP client I've ever seen is a creeping nightmare for the user to configure (SSL? TLS? Kerb? NTLM? GSSAPI?). Oh, you can get it to barely work, but it will never work right. There will always be oddities like all your folders appearing as subfolders of your inbox, or separator issues, or folders randomly disappearing (subscription issues), etc. IMAP is a horribly overcomplex protocol for what it does, and effectively makes it impossible to write a sold client.

Another problem is synchronicity. All IMAP clients that I've seen seem to think that they have exclusive access to the mailbox. When I read a message on my phone, I want it instantly marked as read on my desktop. When I move a message from one folder to another, I want to see that change everywhere, instantly. Today, you need to quit & restart each client for them to update their status. That's a showstopper.

Another problem is filtering. This is something that MUST be done server-side. Client-side filtering is simply too big a maintenance headache for anybody uses multiple clients to access the same mailbox. SIEVE is awful. I'm not sure what the guys who wrote it were thinking... Probably something along the lines of, "if we make it take 5 man-years to write a working Sieve GUI, we're assured luuuucrative consulting contracts for the rest of our lives. hahahaha!" Sieve is actually worse than nothing because it's now an obstacle to developing a good, simple, working solution.

What about standardizing tagging and labeling? And junk mail handling?

I guess that will do for now. I could keep going if prompted. :)

Today, the problem is poorly designed protocols. The webmail guys don't have to fight IMAP and Sieve, so they don't need to worry about broken clients/servers, so they can develop their software 10X faster than the poor desktop guys.

It pains me to watch all this vital information slowly moving into opaque silos. But, at this point, I don't know what can be done about it.