Comment by saurik
2 days ago
I am very confused as to what this is trying to claim... it says it is "IMAP-based, not API-based", and yet it is clearly running its own sync solution, including to web browsers.
2 days ago
I am very confused as to what this is trying to claim... it says it is "IMAP-based, not API-based", and yet it is clearly running its own sync solution, including to web browsers.
Marco is essentially a direct competitor to Superhuman.
However, Superhuman and almost all other products in this space integrate with providers solely via API (like the Gmail API). This means almost all "modern" email products only support Gmail, and perhaps Microsoft if you're lucky.
We've opted to integrate at the IMAP level to allow maximum interop.
There must be some functionality trade-offs that come in to the picture here. What do you see as the key downsides of using the IMAP approach rather than integrating with email providers via their APIs?
Good question.
There are no pure "functionality" trade-offs. IMAP _is_ the defacto email protocol and supports everything that email "does".
There are, however, _massive_ implementation trade-offs. The reason almost all email products use APIs instead of IMAP is: IMAP is really hard. Orchestrating and abstracting over IMAP for cross-platform usage is insanely hard.
IMAP is antiquated and fundamentally broken. It has race hazards built in, poor querying performance, etc.
JMAP is supposed to be the successor to IMAP, but it's been around for over a decade and the world still runs on IMAP.
We want to build a multi-account, cross-platform, offline-first email app that _just works_. The project was born out of personal frustration. We're not trying to do anything revolutionary. We're building the email app that should have already existed.
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