http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2010/02/how-to-replace-imap.html
http://blog.webhooks.org/2009/02/13/restful-email-over-http/
HTTP has had about 20 years of use, development, testing - culminating in SPDY now, which could get even 40% faster in some cases. I'm not sure I can think of a good reason not to make the switch.
Fixing the perceived drawbacks of IMAP would seem to be a more productive goal than trying to produce a competing protocol/standard. (Cf. http://xkcd.com/927/)
Better that than have everyone builds its own incompatible HTTP / REST API for common services.
I do wonder if there's any big companies like Google which have pledged to support this spec?
The end.
The only way I can see that working out would be if MTAs and MUAs negotiated during handshaking to decide on what message format they preferred, and then the MTA translated the message either to traditional RFC 2822 or some other preferred format, which could be JSON or pure XML or whatever.
[...]
Microsoft did some early work on HTTP access to email. The Outlook Express client application uses a fully HTTP-based interface to do all mail functions on Exchange mail stores as well as Hotmail. At the time, Hotmail could or did not support IMAP. The Microsoft API uses PROPFIND to list mailbox contents (this mechanism predated Atom by several years).
With that said, I've been exploring the concept a while back myself. I tend to think of email as the largest "social" network in the world, and I think it's good to give it a sexy web face, and then extend it.
Actually I think that the CSS is what is appealing, not the source marked up file.
If you want, you can convert Markdown into RFC 2629 documents with <https://github.com/cabo/kramdown-rfc2629>.
HTTP Access to Email Stores
Content fetched 0 seconds ago