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Comment on Amazon Starts Email Service for Companiesparent

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Sounds wonderful until you have actually tried to integrate IMAP "supported" email services, such as Gmail. What makes it hard is that different providers have different implementations which very often do not follow the protocol spec. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo all have their own higher-level API for email access, and every modern email tool ends up making something like Nilas, with a server taking care of pushes and managing logic for each provider. The industry needs a new standard, and that is why ideas such as Nilas seem exciting.

That's an argument for providers implementing the spec correctly, not an argument for abandoning specifications in favor of various proprietary APIs.

We've already learned this lesson with web browsers and HTML specs, maybe we'll have to learn it again for email.

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