Use IMAP instead of NNTP?

[antekone]

Not sure what is a better place for such topic, so I guess I'll try here.

I did a similar project in the past, a reddit-to-nntp and lobsters-to-nntp gateway with posting support, and I've encountered two issues:

• Some NNTP software will actually slow down to a crawl when there is large number of messages returned by the NNTP server (I'm looking at Thunderbird, no such issues with slrn/gnus),
• There is an issue with read flag synchronization in case the user uses multiple machines. So, when I read a message, or catch up with a news group on one machine, I have to do the same on another machine.

I'm wondering if anyone has been considering using IMAP instead of NNTP as a gateway target? So reddit2nntp would become reddit2imap. That would definitely solve issue 2, but I'm wondering about 1. Some informative reddit threads are massive (e.g. r/OutOfTheLoop) and I wonder if e-mail clients would be prepared for such amounts of messages.

So, did anyone consider IMAP instead of NNTP on projects like these? Or have experience with IMAP with massive amount of e-mails? My IMAP inbox counts ~50.000 e-mails and it's fine, but 50.000 is peanuts when we're talking about mirroring interesting threads from reddit ;)