ietf-nntp Selective download of MIME multipart/alternative in NNTP

[Ned Freed]

> > Some sites (Carnegie Mellon University comes to mind) have clients read news
> > using the IMAP4 protocol rather then NNTP.  This is an option elsewhere and
> > could be used instead of extending NNTP.

> I'd rather see folks improving NNTP than kludging IMAP to work for news.
> NNTP was built for news. IMAP was not.

Actually, IMAP was built to be a message access protocol (just like the name
says), and news as a source of messages was taken into consideration throughout
the design. (Indeed, there are a bunch of things in IMAP that are considerably
more complex that than they need to be to deal with email alone.)

You may not agree with some of the decisions that were made as part of the
design, but it is nevertheless incorrect to say that IMAP wasn't built to
accomodate news. It was.

				Ned