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0 pointsHeXetic5y ago0 comments

What do you think they can do with their custom API that IMAP can't? IMAP has server-side search and a file-based representation of things like configuration. It may not be as easy to write as a JSON API, but once you do, the interface is flexible enough to really accomplish anything.

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dewey5y ago

Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach which is the one feature that sets HEY apart from the other providers wouldn't really work with normal IMAP.

As for IMAP with more JSON there would also be Fastmails https://jmap.io/

zimpenfish5y ago

> Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach

Unless I'm missing something about what they're doing, this is a basic SIEVE script that filters anything not explicitly whitelisted into a folder.

dewey5y ago

This has a bit of a "I can build Dropbox with a bunch of shell scripts over the weekend" vibe. I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? Manually moving things to the IMAP Inbox and which then marks them as whitelisted somehow?

You could probably build that with a bunch of hacks but you'll not get a polished consumer friendly feature out of that. They are not in competition with people running mutt and a bunch of custom scripts, it's more of an alternative for people using Gmail with Gmail apps currently and don't even know what's IMAP.

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HeXeticOP5y ago

The server can put messages into whatever folders it wants. Different folders can even put the same message into multiple meta-folders. The whitelist can be stored as a message (as basically a file) in a config folder. This is pretty straightforward IMAP.

Again I'm not arguing that IMAP isn't creaky and clumsy but let's not pretend that lack of power is the reason they didn't use it.

bradly5y ago

Can IMAP snooze messages?

zimpenfish5y ago

That'd be down to the IMAP server to support, I suspect, but you could certainly have one that understood the logic - "if there's a message in Snoozed and it's older than X, move it to Inbox". If you have access to your mail, you could do it yourself with a shell script and cron.

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dewey5y ago

Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach which is the one feature that sets HEY apart from the other providers wouldn't really work with normal IMAP.

As for IMAP with more JSON there would also be Fastmails https://jmap.io/

zimpenfish5y ago

> Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach

Unless I'm missing something about what they're doing, this is a basic SIEVE script that filters anything not explicitly whitelisted into a folder.

dewey5y ago

2 more replies

HeXeticOP5y ago

Again I'm not arguing that IMAP isn't creaky and clumsy but let's not pretend that lack of power is the reason they didn't use it.

bradly5y ago

Can IMAP snooze messages?

zimpenfish5y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse