JMAP is the best email protocol out there that nobody uses (besides Fastmail), sadly.<p>It would be great that the two big email providers (Google and Microsoft) implemented and supported it.<p>It would make so easier and reliable to have a single client that works really well across personal and business email accounts, for example.
Unrelated to the discussion of JMAP, but I had the pleasure of helping host the mentioned Inbox Love conference, assisting Josh Baer and Jared Goralnick. That conference was such a fun one!<p>Targeted, focused conferences like Inbox Love, with 150ish or fewer attendees, are by far my favorite because you can actually get to know folks, ideas flow more easily, and everyone is focused on approximately the same thing. Much better than huge, multi-track conferences. We should host more of those as an industry.
I really wanted JMAP to work, but FastMail can't innovate on a protocol level while providing a stale and boring product.<p>They need to motivate people to use FastMail to boost JMAP adoption and they've failed to do that for a decade.<p>They post their 12 days of Christmas blog every year and never a new feature to be found.<p>If you can't add shiny features to your service with a new shiny protocol that promises to break down silos, then it doesn't stand a chance.<p>What will replace IMAP will be what changes email forever, and we've not seen that yet in an open protocol.<p>We should revisit Google / Apache Wave
I have considered writing an E-Mail client, so I’ve done a little research on the ecosystem.<p>JMAP seems like exactly the protocol I’d want to use to avoid much of the IMAP pain, but there’s almost no ecosystem.<p>If I wrote an E-Mail client for JMAP, I’d basically make it for Fastmail and for Fastmail only - and I couldn’t even do so without <i>paying Fastmail</i>. That’s untenable, I’d be 100x better off targeting the GMail API.<p>An IMO perfect way to jumpstart adoption would be an IMAP-to-JMAP proxy, which I don’t think currently exists (maybe due to basic deficiencies in IMAP, I’m not sure). It would allow people waiting to develop and use modern clients relatively easily.<p>Currently the best way to get non first party JMAP infrastructure seems to be to host Stalwart (<a href="https://stalw.art/" rel="nofollow">https://stalw.art/</a>) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.
I get that this is a huge effort and that it takes a long time for protocol adoption (especially if the big companies aren’t behind it). I don’t know why Fastmail has developed mobile apps but no desktop applications so far. One justification could be higher usage on mobile, but it still leaves desktop users out (of JMAP).<p>Without more email clients supporting it, mail providers don’t have any incentive to support JMAP. Mozilla Thunderbird started looking at JMAP but hasn’t progressed on that all these years.<p>> In 10 years time, I hope to post about how Cyrus and JMAP have taken over the world<p>I believe the biggest hurdles are other email clients and providers not adopting it. The biggest threat is Microsoft, as usual, pushing its own protocols and client and using FUD to brainwash CIOs into believing that any protocol outside its own is a major security threat that just cannot be handled.<p>If either Apple or Google could be convinced to implement and support JMAP, this could take off a lot faster.
This? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol</a><p><i>They cited IMAP's complexity, high resource use,</i><p><i>JMAP is implemented using JSON APIs over HTTP</i><p>They complain about complexity, then add another two layers of complexity in their own protocol?<p>I think POP3 is the simplest standard, and have also written a basic IMAP client. Parsing IMAP isn't as easy as a binary protocol, but it's definitely not at the level of HTTP JSON bloat that seems to have infected all "modern" protocol designers. I can use POP3 reasonably easily from a netcat (and have done so many times in the past), and IMAP is a little harder but doable. I don't expect that to be doable for JMAP which is text-based like the other HTTP JSON bloatocols, but unlike the earlier text-based standards like SMTP POP3 IMAP IRC MSNP etc., it seems to have all the disadvantages of a text-based protocol but none of the advantages.