Ten Years of JMAP
103 points by wycx 6 months ago | 80 comments- gjmveloso 6 months agoJMAP is the best email protocol out there that nobody uses (besides Fastmail), sadly.
It would be great that the two big email providers (Google and Microsoft) implemented and supported it.
It would make so easier and reliable to have a single client that works really well across personal and business email accounts, for example.
- mort96 6 months agoSadly, Google and Microsoft are in the business of getting their users to use their own gmail and outlook clients. They don't want to be invisible IMAP/JMAP back-ends, they want to own your e-mail experience.
- CuriousSkeptic 6 months agoBesides, MS already have their own solution that goes way beyond just mail: Microsoft Graph
- Mailtemi 6 months agoMSGraph is slower and not as convenient for email compared to JMAP. In addition to requiring more API calls for the same result, MSGraph starts throttling with HTTP 429 responses after several calls, making the initial synchronization much slower than JMAP or even IMAP.
Hopefully, next year there will be JMAP support for Contacts. As RFC drafts, there are already JMAP specifications for Files and Calendar...
- Mailtemi 6 months ago
- stonogo 6 months agoAnd they standardized MTA-STS to ensure that you must use web technologies if you want to use email.
- joecool1029 6 months agoWhat about Amazon? They could do it with AWS. It seems odd now to think they haven't offered a service like this yet.
- dgeiser13 6 months agoGmail supports IMAP.
- CuriousSkeptic 6 months ago
- hyhconito 6 months agoI think the first "big tech" adopter would be Apple if anything. Their entire email stack is standard protocols.
But you have to ask on that scale, what would it bring them other than change if everything already works fine?
- Mailtemi 6 months agoJMAP uses fewer resources server-side, and with their scale, it will probably reduce operating costs. But it will depends on how much they will save compared with devel/migration costs.
- hyhconito 6 months agoIt may use less sockets but that doesn't necessarily mean less resources. Parsing JSON is expensive, especially when there are binary types interleaved in it.
- hyhconito 6 months ago
- noprocrasted 6 months ago> what would it bring them other than change if everything already works fine?
IMAP is absolutely terrible on unreliable connections. A connectionless protocol based on HTTP would do much better in those conditions.
- hyhconito 6 months agoI'm not sure it does if I'm honest. The encapsulation via JSON is quite bad and transactional model of HTTP is non-existent. One of our key problems on our platform is deciding on how to handle failures like that in transactional systems. Email is to some degree transactional due to the distributed state. It's going to get ugly.
IMAP is ugly but that is all well understood.
- hyhconito 6 months ago
- Mailtemi 6 months ago
- amluto 6 months agoI have no idea whether JMAP is any good, but I find all the hype utterly baffling. JMAP is supposedly awesome. There is real thoughtful engineering going into offline support: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-mail-storage/
And yet: at least as of a couple months ago, there isn’t actually any offline support! The Fastmail first party app does not work at all offline. Complete failure. Does not even try. Oh, and it has dramatically worse threading support than even Gmail or Outlook.
I don’t get it. POP3 is awful and kind of works offline. IMAP is old, clunky, and works fairly well offline. JMAP is supposedly the new hotness, but the paid first party experience will not even try to load offline. This is table stakes! Eudora could do this. Every version of Outlook ever could do this. Thunderbird can, and always could, do this. The usual command-line clients work offline if configured appropriately. Heck, Google went above and beyond and made Gmail’s webmail work quite well offline if you care to set it up, and I think they did a bunch of early work on service workers to make this possible. Fastmail, please stop pitching your fancy protocols until you can get your clients up to the state of the art as of twenty to thirty years ago.
edit: Huh, mobile offline support is in beta as of December 16. No way!
- radicality 6 months agoSimilarly, I wish I could find some iOS mail app that allows me to have the have the full mailbox locally. I use Gmail with the Mail app on iOS, and tried multiple mail apps to try to find one that will download the whole mailbox with all attachments and let me search it locally quickly, but seems that doesn’t exist. On Mac I’m using Mailmate and liking it.
- Mailtemi 6 months agoI'm actually working on this (https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/). After pushing Mailtemi on Android, I will continue working on full offline support.
- Mailtemi 6 months ago
- radicality 6 months ago
- throw0101b 6 months ago> It would make so easier and reliable to have a single client that works really well across personal and business email accounts, for example.
Does not Thunderbird work with Gmail/Microsoft/etc? Does not Apple's Mail.app?
- antifarben 6 months agoStalwartMail supports JMAP out of the box
- mort96 6 months ago
- ljoshua 6 months agoUnrelated 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!
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.
- andrewshadura 6 months agoI wish JMAP was more widely supported on the client side. None of the clients I use support it, sadly.
- mcny 6 months agoOn the flip side, I would like to see a free of cost email provider offer JMAP as well. It could be a limited version in the sense that something like the free version only has limited storage or something but it offers the full JMAP experience ^TM or at least that's my expectation to use JMAP.
How come there are no free of cost email providers that support JMAP?
- Mailtemi 6 months agoYou can use https://stalw.art. Compared to other email stacks, it is very easy to set up. Its support is on par with Fastmail. I develop a JMAP email app (https://mailtemi.com) and have run equal tests against stalw.art locally as well as Fastmail.
- amaccuish 6 months agoBut there’s no calendar or contacts support with stalwart right?
- amaccuish 6 months ago
- Mailtemi 6 months ago
- hyhconito 6 months agoThat’ll be the case in ten years as well.
I know a couple of people who run large email stacks (500k+ users) and this isn’t on their radar and there is no interest in it. There is a little disdain as they are comp sci people and don’t like JSON at all (I share that concern).
Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.
- hnlmorg 6 months agoI’m not exactly the biggest fan of JSON either but given the clusterfuck of established email technologies, moaning about JSON is a little hypocritical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_b...
- hyhconito 6 months agoIt's more: we have two clusterfucks now thus might as well use the one we know best.
At least no one tried to use YAML on the wire, so far anyway.
- hyhconito 6 months ago
- userbinator 6 months agoEmail is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.
And it'd better stay that way, as it's also the most widely used set of standards for communication across borders, that people rely on about as much if not more than traditional telcos now.
(You should know why the common-sense comments are downvoted --- this is basically an advertisement article, and they don't like it when their $shiny_new_thing is actually shown to be worse than the existing solutions. A huge clue is when the adjective "modern" is thrown around like it's a good thing.)
- hyhconito 6 months agoNailed it.
- hyhconito 6 months ago
- hnlmorg 6 months ago
- mcny 6 months ago
- rawkode 6 months agoI really wanted JMAP to work, but FastMail can't innovate on a protocol level while providing a stale and boring product.
They need to motivate people to use FastMail to boost JMAP adoption and they've failed to do that for a decade.
They post their 12 days of Christmas blog every year and never a new feature to be found.
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.
What will replace IMAP will be what changes email forever, and we've not seen that yet in an open protocol.
We should revisit Google / Apache Wave
- chillfox 6 months agoAs one of their customers, I really appreciate that they don't upend everything all the time with pointless features.
Constantly reinventing things and piling on pointless features is one of the things I dislike most about Google, their chat solution is especially egregious for this. It only causes frustration and increases the time investment required to be proficient with the products.
- jolmg 6 months agoThey have added features though. They're just not invasive. They added masked emails, for example. And if I look at the settings right now, I notice they've added customization of what swipes do.
I too like the feeling that they're stable. I guess they're just tactful with their additions.
- chillfox 6 months agoI don't mind new features, but I do very much mind when those new features change the UI, upend how things work or just add clutter.
Not invasive is a good way of putting it, I don't mind new features that are not invasive.
- snapplebobapple 6 months agoI switched a couple years ago because the masked emails and i was tired of histing anonaddy and i couldnt be happier myself. Easily the best mail provider i have used and i have used a bunch of them (including all the big guys, a provider using zimbra,protonmail, etc)
- chillfox 6 months ago
- rawkode 6 months agoThey don't need a new protocol to deliver a stable and sufficient product for their customers, I agree.
I'm suggesting that a new protocol needs hype for adoption and reinventing email needs new capabilities
- jolmg 6 months ago
- ghjfrdghibt 6 months agoI don't get your point. Fastmail provide, foremost, an email service. Boring is good here. Exciting and shiny I don't need.
- rawkode 6 months agoThen you are also fine with IMAP. No new protocol needed.
- chillfox 6 months agoNope, IMAP can't provide the kind of smooth reliable experience that the Fastmail mobile app provides. Now they obviously could have done it in many different ways, but I know from experience with IMAP that it can't do it.
The amount of times IMAP has resulted in duplicate emails when moving mail between folders for me is enough that I eventually gave up on attempting any kind of organization back when I was last using it.
- ghjfrdghibt 6 months agoI'm happy with pop too.
- chillfox 6 months ago
- rawkode 6 months ago
- chillfox 6 months ago
- solarkraft 6 months agoI have considered writing an E-Mail client, so I’ve done a little research on the ecosystem.
JMAP seems like exactly the protocol I’d want to use to avoid much of the IMAP pain, but there’s almost no ecosystem.
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 paying Fastmail. That’s untenable, I’d be 100x better off targeting the GMail API.
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.
Currently the best way to get non first party JMAP infrastructure seems to be to host Stalwart (https://stalw.art/) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.
- AnonC 6 months agoI 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).
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.
> In 10 years time, I hope to post about how Cyrus and JMAP have taken over the world
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.
If either Apple or Google could be convinced to implement and support JMAP, this could take off a lot faster.
- Freak_NL 6 months agoIf JMAP is to be successful, having support in Thunderbird is a must have first step. It's not helpful if the same party that provides the mail service provides the frontend as well. In that case you might as well leave out the open protocol and just push the browser-based client.
I like Fastmail and use it because it provides a service, and does so well (which includes support you can actually reach out to and talk to a human who will actually help you). I also like that my identity and daily e-mail experience is in no way hard-linked to them. I have my own domain, and I use Thunderbird and K9-Mail (now also Thunderbird).
I also like that I can log onto to their website and do things there if needed. This is mostly managing masked e-mail addresses and the occasional check on my subscription settings.
- throw0101b 6 months ago> If JMAP is to be successful, having support in Thunderbird is a must have first step. It's not helpful if the same party that provides the mail service provides the frontend as well.
And if you're going to fund development, also put it in Dovecot.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovecot_(software)
It does seem to be in Cyrus, but I'm not sure what the marketshare of that software is nowadays:
- throw0101b 6 months ago
- jolmg 6 months ago> I don’t know why Fastmail has developed mobile apps but no desktop applications so far.
I wonder what the mobile app adds beyond what the platform-agnostic webapp already does.
- pjerem 6 months agoIt’s the same app actually. At least on iOS.
- pjerem 6 months ago
- Freak_NL 6 months ago
- 6 months ago
- userbinator 6 months agoThis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol
They cited IMAP's complexity, high resource use,
JMAP is implemented using JSON APIs over HTTP
They complain about complexity, then add another two layers of complexity in their own protocol?
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.
- Fnoord 6 months agoPOP3 has no locking. It won't work with multiple clients, and that is awful. But I agree with your assessment. We need good utilities which make JSON human-readable, and which turn human-readable into JSON. Might as well not use JSON, except for internal traffic.
- userbinator 6 months agoPOP3 works fine with multiple clients. I've used it that way for several decades. Doesn't need any locking.
JSON is only excusable if your protocol is designed for webmail clients. Otherwise this is a case of the emperor having no clothes.
- Fnoord 6 months agoIf only one client writes data or if you constantly do full sync (quite expensive on resources), yes. You can't even have different maps to sort content though. You don't follow states. POP3 just doesn't scale well in the end. If you're in 1995 and you get 3 emails a week and get really excited you got an email, then it works very well (I still hated the full syncs on dialup though). I used POP3 for several years in the 90s, even wrote my own client (a very simple protocol) Then end 90s, I used Pine and then Mutt directly in a shell on my ISP, with IMAP and Maildir; a relief! I've never used JMAP, since 1) I quit self-hosting email due to (justified, given spam) complexity of the stack and 2) I don't use Fastmail but Soverin.
- Fnoord 6 months ago
- userbinator 6 months ago
- Fnoord 6 months ago
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