Hi.

Oh well, I did a quick lookup and found that IMAP v4 was first defined December 1994 in RFC1730 and later modernized as IMAP v4.1 in RFC2060 during December 1996. Seven (7) years ago. It's predecessor, IMAP2 was first defined in July 1988 as documented in RFC 1064 and later redefined in RFC1176.

Now to be fair, IMAP2 was never widely used and wasn't really well usable at all. So only IMAP4 has put some useful features in there, but nevertheless, IMAP4 is now seven years old, and it's implementation could be considered stable.

BTW: HTTP was first defined in 1989 (and in use by CERN since 1990) and was in network wide use by 1992. Speaking of slow developing standards.

cu,
sven