ietf-nntp Re: IMAP for News?

[hostmaster]

Gentlepeople

What are some reccommednded Clients and when will a Netscape Beta IMAP
client be available to the public???

Ken
mailto:hostmaster at comdisco.com

Ben Polk wrote:
> 
> At 04:04 PM 10/21/96 -0700, Mark Crispin wrote:
> >On Mon, 21 Oct 1996 15:36:42 -0700 (PDT), Chris Newman wrote:
> >> For now, LIST and LSUB will have to do as
> >> they are.  We can deprecate them later.
> >
> >Agreed -- I think that all of the stuff that ACAP does better should
> >eventually be yanked out of IMAP: LIST, LSUB, CREATE, DELETE, RENAME,
> >SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE.
> >
> >> All of these are very important features, most of which are not available
> >> in NNTP.  I also think adding any more client support functions to NNTP is
> >> a mistake.  NNTP is network news *TRANSFER* protocol, not *access*
> >> protocol or *client* protocol.
> 
> Hoo boy.  I suppose this was bound to come up.
> 
> We're wandering into religious ground.  Here's what I think:
> 
> 0. I believe in IMAP.  Netscape believes in IMAP.  We are committed
> to it, and have been from before the meeting up in Seattle last
> year.  Soon it will be the core protocol in our mail products.  In
> the future I hope it will be our main newsreading protocol as well.
> But...
> 
> 1. NNTP was orignally designed as a transfer protocol, but from the
> very first days clients were using it as well.  And it has had from
> the days of RFC 977 capabilities that were designed explicitly for
> clients: NEWGROUPS, ARTICLE, BODY, HEADER, and so on.  I have
> heard the claim that NNTP is a "*TRANSFER*" protocol before, but
> just because that's part of it's name doesn't mean that's all
> it is designed to do.
> 
> 2. There are at least an order of magnitude more people reading
> News using NNTP than IMAP.  It *is* a client protocol, just look
> around.
> 
> 3. In spite of both of the items above, I think that we should
> try to build IMAP clients and servers that support news well.
> I hope IMAP will eventually replace NNTP as a client reader
> protocol.  I think that mail/news message access will need many
> new things going forward, (I18N enhancements, MIME enhancements,
> partial message fetching, who-knows-what-else) and it is wasteful
> to do all this work in multiple protocols.  (Yes, I know, some
> of this is already in IMAP.)
> 
> 4. But I don't believe that the way to get to a common protocol
> is for IMAP people to to somehow freeze NNTP development.  The way
> to do it is to develop good IMAP products that perform this function
> better than the NNTP products can.  If this is really feasible,
> and we build IMAP products that do this well, eventually it will
> be obvious to everyone that IMAP is the right choice.
> 
> 5. This will take time.  There are hundreds of thousands of NNTP
> servers out there, and it will be a long time before all those
> sites put in parallel IMAP servers.
> 
> Not everyone that works with NNTP believes that IMAP will
> make a better client protocol for news.  The way to convince
> them isn't to tell them they are wrong, it is to build and
> deploy products that *show* them that IMAP is the right
> way to go.  And until they are convinced it won't work
> to tell them to stop innovating and building better products.
> 
> >Tell that to the people who are putting lots of IMAP features (such as SEARCH)
> >into NNTP.
> 
> As we've discussed before, IMAP SEARCH does not operate across
> containers and the undocumented mechanism for doing this leaves a lot
> to be desired.  If all we cared about was searching within a newsgroup
> we'd just live with XPAT.
> 
> >> Adding the few news-related features that
> >> IMAP4 is missing is the way to solve the problem.  There is no reason for
> >> your mail reader and news reader to be separate programs or to use
> >> separate access protocols.
> >
> >This contradicts what you said above about leaving LIST and LSUB alone.
> 
> The IMAP posse needs to determine how far it is willing to
> ride to catch the news bad guys.  ;)
> 
> Ben "Only half a news bad guy" Polk

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