I did say that most of these features are available with extensions, didn't I?
Yes, but I just had to comment on them :)
Please, I'm not trying to start an Exchange protocol vs IMAP protocol.
Me neither. My point was mostly just that a few open protocols with some required extensions can do everything that a fully proprietary protocol. You wouldn't necessarily have to call it IMAP at all in client side to avoid confusion. Some people might not like it, but IMHO it's still better than fully proprietary protocol.
The discussion
is ONLY about Steve Conn's comments about IMAP not being as feature rich
as IMAP (which was used as a part of a justification for ceasing forward
development of Outlook Express). And any responses I'm making are in
the context of what Outlook Express needs to support, NOT what a
hypothetical tightly linked open protocol client/server solution would
require.
Exchange protocol of course already exists, so it's pretty clear that it's being used. But simply from protocol feature richness point of view, there's not much that is missing from IMAP + CAP + etc. protocol suite that could replace the functionality exchange protocol.
Only with certain message stores and only with certain servers. You can't guarantee the feature. And Outlook Express (the client in question) can't assume a single IMAP server - it can only use the features available in ALL the servers.
And better alternative is to support no IMAP servers at all?
Actually I'm referring to Exchange's search folders - basically you can create a search folder on the store, and whenever a message is created that matches the search criteria, the message gets added to the folder, and the client is notified about the new message automagically. SEARCH is static.
Oh, something like virtual folders in Evolution. Hmm. Nice idea actually, have to think about this later. It should be possible without IMAP protocol changes, you'd just have to have some way of configuring them, eg. ANNOTATEMORE.
