IMAP IDLE support in platform Email app

[Daniel Briley]

Hi All

First I'd like to say hi to everyone since this is my first post.

I just wanted to ask - What's the position regarding IMAP IDLE support
in the official Email platform app? I noticed an enhancement request
in the tracker for it, but I haven't seen anything that suggests it'll
be appearing at any point soon.

Presumably with IMAP being an open standard, adding IDLE support
wouldn't be surrounded with legal issues in the same way as maybe
ActiveSync? Are there any other barriers to implementing it besides it
being a low priority? I realise the Android team are hard at work with
all sorts of things so need to prioritise.

Is support for IDLE something that Google would consider accepting a
patch for?

Many thanks

Daniel

[GC]

The K9 application already has support for IMAP IDLE.

As I understand it, the group developing K9 has made it known their
changes are freely available for Google to integrate.

[lbcoder]

Except that what they really need to do is actually make and submit
the patches to AOSP and not expect google to come out searching the
web for every little bit of everything -- AND expect them to find it.

[Disconnect]

When the patches were in shape to be submitted, google was not accepting patches. Since then the k9 team has said they are going to continue development rather than spending weeks (or more) refactoring thousands of lines of patches into pieces for upstream. (Plus there was a big to-do over the fact that nothing requiring a UI change would be accepted because of the mysterious, hidden "graphic designers" who have no standards or requirements but rule everything with an iron fist. Fun stuff.)

At this point, it would be much simpler to recreate the imap idle support from scratch and submit it as a standalone project.

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[Daniel Briley]

I was already aware of the K-9 project. They're doing great things,
but there's things I also like about the platform e-mail client,
especially the 2.0 one. My question was specifically about the
platform client.

For anyone that hasn't found them already, there's actually a couple
of threads in the archives of this mailing list relating to K-9 and
the issues surrounding some of their changes making it in to the
platform. That's where I found some of the same comments that
Disconnect was talking about relating to UI changes. To me it seems
like although the AOSP provides periodic code drops, the development
is still very closed in that were disconnected from the design process
that Google goes through when implementing new features. We have no
access to requirements specifications, UI guidelines, etc (please
correct me if I'm wrong and accept my apologies). We have limited
knowledge on what the direction for the future is and what's in the
works. It makes it very hard to contribute in a way that will be
useful and not counter-productive. I could well be wrong on some of
this since I haven't been reading these mailing lists for long, but
it's the impression I'm getting so far. Don't get me wrong though,
Google are doing some great work. If that means AOSP gets a bit less
attention than it deserves while they're hard at work, then I can live
with that. At the moment I'm not too sure whether some of the above
frustrations I mentioned are just a product of Google not having the
time/resources to to devote to AOSP, or whether it's a more deliberate
thing.

When it comes to the restriction on UI related patches that Disconnect
mentioned, how would things work? We submit a patch for a feature,
minus the UI changes and then Google integrates our code, adding the
appropriate UI that falls in line with these guidelines?

To me it just seems a bit odd that the platform client doesn't have
IDLE support. I suppose ActiveSync support was much higher on the
priority list, which is understandable. I myself use the ActiveSync
support and don't really want to have to switch between K9 and the
platform client depending on whether I'm looking at an IMAP account
(using IDLE) or looking at an Exchange account with ActiveSync. Now
I've got used to push e-mail, I like it too much to not use it where I
can. As far as I understand it, porting the ActiveSync support to K-9
(or even forking the 2.0 platform client which contains the ActiveSync
support) would be a no go since ActiveSync is licensed by Google from
Microsoft. I could just do with a client that supports ActiveSync and
IDLE.

By the way, please correct me on anhything I've said if I'm wrong. I'm
only still learning....

Dan

On Jan 7, 2:27 pm, Disconnect <dc.disconn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When the patches were in shape to be submitted, google was not accepting
> patches. Since then the k9 team has said they are going to continue
> development rather than spending weeks (or more) refactoring thousands of
> lines of patches into pieces for upstream. (Plus there was a big to-do over
> the fact that nothing requiring a UI change would be accepted because of the
> mysterious, hidden "graphic designers" who have no standards or requirements
> but rule everything with an iron fist. Fun stuff.)
>
> At this point, it would be much simpler to recreate the imap idle support
> from scratch and submit it as a standalone project.
>

> > android-platfo...@googlegroups.com<android-platform%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>