--On Thursday, August 14, 2003 10:03:46 AM -0700 Larry Osterman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| The Exchange protocol is orders of magnitude richer than IMAP, but it's | not standard (which is why it's totally proprietary :)). | | For example, it natively supports calendaring, threading, asynchronous | notifications, multiple message stores, incremental content | synchronization (at the property level), multiple simultaneous client | access, public and private message folder stores, etc. It also supports | compression of the wire format, encryption of the datastream, etc. It | allows message submission with rich message send options (deferred send, | etc). It allows for message filtering, client and server side rules, | etc. It allows for content indexing, dynamic searching and sorting of | the message store. It allows for notifications of new folder creation | and deletion. | | Many of these things can be done with IMAP, but rely on extensions to | both IMAP and SMTP. |
I think the problem here is that the comparison shouldn't be between Exchange and IMAP, but rather Exchange and {the set of open standards protocols designed to implement messaging and collaboration - i.e. IMAP, POP, SMTP, ICAP, SIEVE etc with corresponding standard extensions}. Even with those others added in, its true that Exchange is still ahead in terms of features, but the gap isn't as wide as one might think.
The real question is whether the current design of multiple open standards protocols for implementing messaging and collaboration is the best approach, as opposed to having a single modularized monolithic protocol to do all that. As an implementor, it is a pain to have to add support for a completely new protocol to just add calendaring (something I'm actually having to do right now). We're also beginning to see the need for a certain amount of 'overlap' between protocols (c.f. lemonade WG issues with submission via IMAP).
So what are the real pro's and con's between monolithic protocol vs multiple task-specific protocols? And is that the real limitation in terms of 'richness' that we are seeing here?
-- Cyrus Daboo
