Managing IMAP

Present and Future of IMAP

In the not-so-recent past, IMAP was largely thought of as an overly complex method for managing email, and POP was considered just fine. However, nearly everyone supports or promises to support IMAP these days. That makes the size of the development investment in IMAP possibly second only to HTTP. You would think this would be a good thing. As you’ll read later, however, at least on the MUA side of the house, there’s some sloppy implementation going on.

This actually ends up being a good thing. In an open-standard marketplace, the more users who reject the one or two large-market-share apps in preference to the plethora of smaller-market apps, the more diversity there is in the market. Some of the best IMAP implementation going on right now is from companies you probably have never heard of before. If the one or two market leaders hadn’t given away their market share, the IMAP market would be as locked up as the PC operating system market.

With the added complexity of IMAP comes greater flexibility. With flexibility comes a broader base of technologies on which it can be implemented, ranging from interactive voice response to wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs). In one sense, the success of a standard might be measured by the number of related standards it inspires.

The glory days of IMAP are just beginning. Here’s a brief list of where we stand as of this writing:

• Dozens of IMAP implementations exist for nearly every desktop and server ...