Subject: Re: Deployment cases

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 15:18:59 -0500

Dave,

RTP is implemented and used in millions of devices, including just  
about all enterprise VoIP systems and H.323. Not as widely used for  
streaming, from what I can tell.

There are obviously other IETF streaming and VoIP technologies with  
RFC # > 2500 that are seeing large-scale use, including SIP, SDP, MGCP  
and RTSP, both in the enterprise and across closed and open IP networks.

Faulting IMAP4 for lack of inter-domain use seems peculiar, given that  
its purpose is to retrieve email by users within the domain.

Calling VPN a "niche" also seems a bit strange. By that threshold,  
everything that doesn't get run by every single PC is a failure, which  
basically means that we should have stopped protocol work after IPv4,  
TCP and HTTP. (I suspect that the vast majority of PCs are no longer  
running either POP, IMAP or SMTP, since many people now use webmail  
instead or don't use email at all, having switched to Facebook and IM.)

Henning

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:46:08 -0800

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
> There are obviously other IETF streaming and VoIP technologies with RFC 
> # > 2500 that are seeing large-scale use, including SIP, SDP, MGCP and 
> RTSP, both in the enterprise and across closed and open IP networks.

SIP does seem to have reached critical mass for declaring Internet-scale 
success, doesn't it?

I can't judge the others you list and would appreciate comments from folks who 
can.

> its purpose is to retrieve email by users within the domain.

Wasn't sure how to phrase that. What I mean was to distinguish between "within 
an organization" versus between organizations, and particularly 
consumer-vs-ISP scenarios, where the user is interacting with the service 
provider but is still independent of them.

In other words, I believe IMAP gets used as a MAPI surrogate, but not as a 
general-purpose means of accessing mailboxes supplied by consumer-oriented 
service providers.

Those providers usually make IMAP available, but my sense is that it is not 
used all that much.  POP seems to remain vastly preferred.

> everything that doesn't get run by every single PC is a failure, which 

If something is intended for a specialized use and it attains that use, it is 
not a failure.  By the same token, there is a big difference between 
satisfying a small market versus satisfying the needs of 1 Billion+ folk.

So, yeah, a 'niche' might be 100M users, but that's still only 10% of everyone.

So how about calling these "segments" since that won't carry the baggage that 
"niche" probably does?

For example, the "intra-organization" segment is significant, but there is 
still the question of how much penetration is attained within that segment.

My intent is not to say that segments don't matter but that they are 
specialized (and, yeah, some are extremely small, while others are quite 
large.) Characterizing success within a segment can help us understand the 
limitations that might constrain broader use.  An obvious example is admin and 
ops overhead, which can be made more manageable for some protocols when they 
are used within relatively homogeneous environments.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net

---

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 17:20:41 -0500

> used all that much.  POP seems to remain vastly preferred.

I don't think that's true.  A lot of people want to be able to access
their mail stores from multiple clients, and POP doesn't do that well
at all.  MS Outlook and Outlook express both support IMAP, and you get
more functionality if you use IMAP.  Google's Gmail didn't support
IMAP at first, and quite a large number of people complained about
that.

My favorite trick is to use the "isync" program
(http://isync.sourceforge.net) to synchronize an IMAP store with a
local Maildir directory on my laptop.  I can then read and delete my
e-mail on the laptop while disconnected from the network, and then at
the end of the airplane trip, when I gain access to the network, I can
synchronize my local Maildir store with the IMAP server store; e-mails
which I deleted on my local machine are deleted on the IMAP server,
and new e-mails that have since arrived get downloaded to my laptop.
This is also great in Europe where the local wireless ISP's appear to
be run by Ferengi, since I can minimize the number of minutes I need
to be connected to the network.  And, if anything ever happens to my
laptop, I have a backup copy of my e-mail on the IMAP server, which is
not usually the case with POP.  (POP is vastly more inefficient if you
leave e-mails on the server, since the protocol really isn't designed
for that.)

Basically, the combination of isync and mutt as a MUA gives me all of
the advantages of Lotus Notes' disconnected operation, except it's
faster, uses 10 times less memory, has decent search capabilities, and
has reasonable threading support.  :-)

						- Ted

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:01:04 -0800

Theodore Tso wrote:
> at all.  

Ted,

You and I and pretty much everyone reading this email are not representative 
of the broader Internet community.  So the question is how to document the 
assessment that "lots of people" do use IMAP.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 00:14:34 +0100

On 2 jan 2008, at 0:01, Dave Crocker wrote:

> You and I and pretty much everyone reading this email are not  
> representative of the broader Internet community.  So the question  
> is how to document the assessment that "lots of people" do use IMAP.

What was the purpose of this dicussion again?

If 10 million people use IMAP it was a waste of the IETF's time to  
develop it, but if 100 million people use it it's ok?

By that measure, we should stop developing routing protocols.  
Especially that pesky BGP protocol is a miserable failure: after 15  
years, we can still number the organizations that use it (publically)  
out of a 16-bit space. But then, only a few handfuls of niche vendors  
implement it.

Compare that to IPv6, which is highly successful, because every Mac  
sold the last 5 years and every Vista machine sends a few IPv6 packets  
as soon as you plug an ethernet cable into it.

---

From: Jaap Akkerhuis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:25:49 +0100

So the question is how to document the 
    assessment that "lots of people" do use IMAP.

Start to ask oufits like https://www.imap4all.com/ but what is the
poinmt of this discussion anyway?

	jaap

---

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 20:19:51 -0500

On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 03:01:04PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
> representative of the broader Internet community.  So the question is how 
> to document the assessment that "lots of people" do use IMAP.

So all of the people who wanted to Google gmail to use IMAP and the
fact that Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express support IMAP
and give you more functionality if IMAP is enabled isn't at least
suggestive that "lots of people" are using IMAP?

Corporations might be using MS Exchange, but most individual end-users
who are using mail service provided by the ISP are probably using IMAP.

But I'm not sure why we need to prove that IMAP is success to your
satisfaction.  Certainly the fact that many mail providers are
providing IMAP, and many MUA's can use the IMAP protocol, with more
functionality to their users compared to POP, is at least in my book
proof of the protocol's success.  If you want to think otherwise,
that's fine.

						- Ted