IMAP4 : The mobile application protocol we didn’t know we had

gigaom.com — IMAP4 is a little discussed but widely used protocol for accessing and managing email. As it turns out, IMAP is also a great way to deliver information to mobile applications, by repurposing mobile IMAP clients for use in a wide range of mobile applications. Jun 5, 2011 View in Crawl 4

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IMAP4 : The mobile application protocol we didn’t know we had

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rblancarte Jun 6, 2011

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I understand what they are saying in terms of how IMAP has a good structure for delivery of mobile application data. But this does call for hacking IMAP in a way that it isn't intended for normal use.

It seems, though a little more work, a better option would be to develop an open, generic application standard was designed for a much more flexible data structures to come through, though based on the principles of how IMAP works. Done properly, this Mobile App Access Protocol could be a very easy to use and become a main underlying component of every mobile phone in the future, as well as the servers that serve them.

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skaag Jun 6, 2011

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I think the point here is that you already have tons of IMAP servers around the planet, why not use them to store applications? If you develop a new protocol, you also need server owners to run a new piece of software. By leaving IMAP untouched, and simply repurposing it slightly, you make no changes to how mail servers work today, but you make available a huge amount of space for storing applications "in the cloud".

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brix Jun 7, 2011

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I agree that *technically* it's a decent protocol and great pre-existing infrastructure for app data storage, but do we really want to give every app access to our e-mail for this purpose? There are way too many opportunities for malware to take advantage of this for it to be useful.