On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Larry Osterman wrote: >Trust Larry to stick his foot squarely in his mouth and reply to this >one :) >The Exchange protocol is orders of magnitude richer than IMAP, but it's >not standard (which is why it's totally proprietary :)).
There evidently goes a fine line between richness and bloat. Anyone can put anything into a protocol, and if they are paid to do so they will not hold back. After all, when all is done inside one company, nobody has to think about interoperability and design. Some protocols even have obfuscation layers to prevent reverse engineering. IMAP is a mail protocol. In that respect, it is very rich and very extensible. No, IMAP does not support calendaring. I doesn't even support worms or Word macro viruses! Still so many find it useful. I have worked with a multitude of proprietary protocols that suck big time, while still being rich and full of features. So I don't support your implicit distinction between marvelous proprietary protcols and poor open ones. Andy -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen http://www.bincimap.org/
