HTTP Access to Email Stores

We're not talking about webmail here, but direct access by HTTP request, either from a website or a desktop/mobile client. Some other relevant links for this:<p><a href="http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2010/02/how-to-replace-imap.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2010/02/how-to-replace-imap.html</a><p><a href="http://blog.webhooks.org/2009/02/13/restful-email-over-http/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.webhooks.org/2009/02/13/restful-email-over-http/</a><p>HTTP has had about 20 years of use, development, testing - culminating in SPDY now, which could get even 40% faster in some cases. I'm not sure I can think of a good reason <i>not</i> to make the switch.

How about we get rid of all the MIME/XML stuff and just represent emails as JSON objects?<p>The end.

If we're going to keep moving more and more apps from native to Web-based, I think we're going to see a lot more of this (standardizing an existing service to be accessible over HTTP), since WebSockets can't connect to any raw TCP sockets (and they shouldn't, that would be terrible security-wise) and WebRTC has the same approach: a protocol of its own with its own handshake &#38; rules.<p>Better that than have everyone builds its own incompatible HTTP / REST API for common services.<p>I do wonder if there's any big companies like Google which have pledged to support this spec?

Didn't Outlook Express use some sort of DAV HTTP protocol to retrieve email from Hotmail?

I'm not familiar with the IETF process, but it says "Expires: April 27, 2009"<p>With that said, I've been exploring the concept a while back myself. I tend to think of email as the largest "social" network in the world, and I think it's good to give it a sexy web face, and then extend it.<p><a href="https://github.com/pepijndevos/Wemail" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pepijndevos/Wemail</a>

FYI, Context.io does something similar to this. I know a few YC companies use them.

What is the mark up language used for this plain text file? I really like the format of these minimalist 1 page documents.