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IMAP sync feature #1123

Open frthjf opened 6 years ago

frthjf commented 6 years ago

I've came across Boostnote and I love it so far, good work! Thanks!

Now, I realised that there is no native sync feature, although you can just sync the notes folder using any cloud provider out there. As requested in #827, many people prefer an encryption or some measure to protect their notes before storing them into the cloud. However, getting encryption right is not easy and has to be very reliable to ensure no data is lost. Therefore, an alternative idea I'd like to discuss is IMAP sync, where the notes are stored like an email into an IMAP folder of your mail account as plain text. How is that different from storing plain text into Dropbox? Well, the IMAP protocol is universal so switching to ANY provider of your trust is easy once the protocol is in place; in fact, as email encryption is not widely spread, most people already trust their email provider enough to store all the sensitive emails in plain texts there and might be more inclined to do so with notes. Secondly, other note keeping tools support IMAP sync, for instance iOS Notes and email provider like posteo.de so it would be become possible to use Notes on your iPhone but Boostnote on your desktop without problems.

From the implementation side, I'm not sure how complex it is to implement IMAP support, but I can imagine it is not harder than encryption + a number of common cloud providers and their respective APIs (here is a ruby script achiving something like this). I would be happy to volunteer and see whether I can help implementing this feature but firstly I wanted to know whether there is actually a demand / approval of something like this from the community.

kohei-takata commented 6 years ago

Hi @frthjf ! Thanks for your interesting opinion! I want to hear other's opinion.

dschneiderch commented 6 years ago

I've been following the discussion for better sync, particularly on the mobile app so perhaps you can get some inspiration from this app that implements IMAP https://github.com/nbenm/ImapNote2

frthjf commented 6 years ago

Thanks @dschneiderch, that looks like a good starting point. I guess the best way to realise IMAP sync would be to develop a package that offers an IMAP note API in a separate project, which can then be potentially pulled in as an dependency by Boostnote (and other notes apps if they want it). It that way, Boostnote does not have to carry and maintain the IMAP overhead in the main project. I would probably be willing to build and maintain such an IMAPNoteAPI, although I'm wondering what the right technology would be? npm package? Java library for Android?

frthjf commented 6 years ago

@kohei-takata Any news on the sync discussion?

Flexo013 commented 5 years ago

@frthjf Sadly this has been thrown on the back burner for a while.

I like this suggestion as a nice alternative to syncing with(out) encryption. If somebody is willing to give implementing this a try then please let us know by commenting here.