I made the video demo that I promised last night. In this video demo I use ettercap and wireshark to show the difference in network traffic between a typical IMAP client and a Tinymail based one when we have an IMAP server that deals with QRESYNC, IDLE and CONDSTORE (like modern IMAP servers do).
Ettercap is a useful tool to follow the traffic while using the applications. Wireshark is interesting to see how frames are formed while the traffic is being transmitted. When working with GPRS, the latency can be very high. This means that with an interactive protocol like IMAP, the time to retrieve and send a frame (the roundtrip time) has a big influence on the network performance of the application.
In the video demo I explain the difference between the old way of working with an IMAP server, and the modern way with QRESYNC and CONDSTORE. My goal is to convince IMAP server developers to consider implementing both CONDSTORE and QRESYNC so that IMAP clients can make better use of the GPRS network, and of course to show that my precious little Tinymail is supporting this already, if available on the IMAP server.
