5 ms·

I have not tried it or looked at it too closely (since neither my server nor client supports it). But I desperately hope that JMAP succeeds. It's exactly what e

by tjoff 8y ago

I have not tried it or looked at it too closely (since neither my server nor client supports it). But I desperately hope that JMAP succeeds. It's exactly what email needs. IMAP and POP are just so inadequate that locking yourself into gmail/whatever is a reasonable choice. With JMAP maybe we will actually see some interest in decent desktop and mobile clients for once. And also maybe we will have decent alternatives to the big players for non-techie people too.

chrismorgan 8y ago
I’ve roughly planned a talk entitled “building a fair dinkum email client in half an hour with JMAP” (I’d take an hour if permitted; the result would be much better). The talk is mostly live coding the thing from scratch, with authentication being the only area where I cheat. I submitted it for Strange Loop earlier this year, but it wasn’t accepted, so I haven’t actually written it yet. Anyone got any suggestions of places to submit it to? That JMAP makes it straightforward to build a rudimentary but fully functional email client gives me hope that people may experiment more than they have been. I believe that a large part of the reason that there are few email clients now is because getting a basically-functioning email client going is a surprisingly large investment of effort, and doing it well is an enormous investment.
- soapdog 8y ago
  I'd love to see this talk :-) so if you want to keep up to date with CFPs, the Mozilla TechSpeakers group maintain a Twitter profile at https://twitter.com/mozTechCFPs https://twitter.com/mozTechCFPs that tweets timely reminders to submit proposals to conferences. It might help you find places to submit your talk. I hope you do it in London then I can see it live but I'd love to see a recording as well :-D
- icebraining 8y ago
  Anyone got any suggestions of places to submit it to? FOSDEM? Probably too late for this year, though.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  36C3 (next year's chaos community congress)? I'd love to see that talk, either in real life or online. Coding my own mail client is something I wanted to do for a long time and if I can make decent headway in only 30-60 minutes, I'd definitely watch that and code along. The only thing I'm afraid of is the programming language, please don't pick some hipster language (e.g. invented in the past five years) or some bloated platform like Electron.
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    For the base version of the talk I’m just using straight HTML and JavaScript with no external libraries. Variants of the talk using other libraries (e.g. React, Vue, whatever the flavour of the month is) would be reasonable. All it needs is for the JMAP endpoint to be CORS-enabled (probably a bad idea in general), or for a simple pass-through proxy to work around that (I’ve already made a simple such tool for personal use at FastMail). Other than that, it’s just running in the browser with no external dependencies; that’s one of the great things about JMAP, compared to IMAP: it’s web-native.
- jolmg 8y ago
  I had to lookup what "fair dinkum" meant. My first reaction was that it was probably a technology that I don't use and probably am not interested in. I would think that others may have similar reactions. Maybe if you took it out? "Building an email client in half an hour with JMAP"? Though that makes it sound like it would work with any email provider. It's not clear that JMAP is a protocol. "Building a JMAP email client in half an hour"? Maybe there's not enough interest in JMAP yet, and a talk that promotes JMAP over IMAP/SMTP would be better first. Maybe the client could be prebuilt and simply presented as part of the talk as FOSS, showing the small LoC that it took and simply mentioning how little time it took. Maybe having it in multiple programming languages would help, too, to show that its simplicity is not a matter of language of choice. Just throwing ideas out there.
kbd 8y ago
> IMAP and POP are just so inadequate that locking yourself into gmail/whatever is a reasonable choice. Totally agree that email protocols need improvement, but there are other benefits to gmail. I'm always going to want reliable service and storage, good spam filtering (and gmail's scale allows them to do that potentially better than anybody), and the interface is pretty good. I can even use my own domain.
- tjoff 8y ago
  Step 1 is a good backup. With JMAP that could be done for any provider, can you with gmail? The solutions that I've seen all seem like hacks. But I have yet to try it so I could be very wrong. But please let me know if there is a decent alternative, I'm about to migrate a google account. I'd hope most decent providers let you use your own domain... It's easy to think gmail spam filtering is good if you never check the spam folder. It has filtered out some very important mails for me and others so I do my very best to disable it. Create a filter for "is:spam" and "Never send it to Spam" is the best solution I know. But despite this google might remove mails anyway.
  - kbd 8y ago
    The spam filtering isn't perfect (can't think of any false negatives, but some false positives. I hedged with "potentially" above) but I receive very little spam so I just check the folder when I get one. And this is with an old school catch-all domain setting too. I haven't looked into backing up gmail.
  - jfb 8y ago
    I've had good success using mbsync to back up a variety of IMAP provided email services. It's not perfect, and does require a little bit of fiddling, but once it's set up, it Just Works™ the way it should. I've even used it to move ~300k mails from Google to Fastmail.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I had a lot of custom spam rules on Gmail because Google takes the opinion of the masses to decide how to filter. Since FastMail's personalized spam filter kicked in, which is based on my opinion, I've never had to make hard rules for FastMail spam handling. Another big advantage is that their spam data aggregation is optional, unlike Gmail's, and solely uses the content of confirmed spam (aka, you permanently deleted it) to refine their data, so no personal data is getting hoovered up with it. I did actually shut off offering up my spam data to the masses on FastMail, because I realized I had an edge case where the filters defining my spam as spam for everyone could be harmful. As far as backup, I have a local Microsoft Outlook which I open every so often which pulls down all the email. I wouldn't mind a Google Takeout-esque download feature from FastMail at some point too though.
tracker1 8y ago
I'm hoping for the same... I started down the rabbit hole of creating a mail server/client once. Regarding IMAP, all I can say is damn, that is a pain and I pretty much gave it all up. Smartermail is probably as close as I've seen to what I'd love to see as a more broad open-source product for mail. I just don't have the patience to wire together a half dozen systems, the maintenance and more to have working email... I have one address hosted via outlook.com (relic from when they had a free tier for personal domains), and the bulk of email is via gmail. I have mail forwards in google domains for a few really old email addresses (just used it the other day to recover an old account). But for the most part, I would love to see some better personal mail options. I've roughly looked at some of the mail in a box stuff, but I don't want all of DNS and the world for the domain controlled under my mail server.

by tjoff 8y ago

chrismorgan 8y ago

I’ve roughly planned a talk entitled “building a fair dinkum email client in half an hour with JMAP” (I’d take an hour if permitted; the result would be much better). The talk is mostly live coding the thing from scratch, with authentication being the only area where I cheat. I submitted it for Strange Loop earlier this year, but it wasn’t accepted, so I haven’t actually written it yet. Anyone got any suggestions of places to submit it to? That JMAP makes it straightforward to build a rudimentary but fully functional email client gives me hope that people may experiment more than they have been. I believe that a large part of the reason that there are few email clients now is because getting a basically-functioning email client going is a surprisingly large investment of effort, and doing it well is an enormous investment.

soapdog 8y ago
I'd love to see this talk :-) so if you want to keep up to date with CFPs, the Mozilla TechSpeakers group maintain a Twitter profile at https://twitter.com/mozTechCFPs https://twitter.com/mozTechCFPs that tweets timely reminders to submit proposals to conferences. It might help you find places to submit your talk. I hope you do it in London then I can see it live but I'd love to see a recording as well :-D
icebraining 8y ago
Anyone got any suggestions of places to submit it to? FOSDEM? Probably too late for this year, though.
lucb1e 8y ago
36C3 (next year's chaos community congress)? I'd love to see that talk, either in real life or online. Coding my own mail client is something I wanted to do for a long time and if I can make decent headway in only 30-60 minutes, I'd definitely watch that and code along. The only thing I'm afraid of is the programming language, please don't pick some hipster language (e.g. invented in the past five years) or some bloated platform like Electron.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  For the base version of the talk I’m just using straight HTML and JavaScript with no external libraries. Variants of the talk using other libraries (e.g. React, Vue, whatever the flavour of the month is) would be reasonable. All it needs is for the JMAP endpoint to be CORS-enabled (probably a bad idea in general), or for a simple pass-through proxy to work around that (I’ve already made a simple such tool for personal use at FastMail). Other than that, it’s just running in the browser with no external dependencies; that’s one of the great things about JMAP, compared to IMAP: it’s web-native.
jolmg 8y ago
I had to lookup what "fair dinkum" meant. My first reaction was that it was probably a technology that I don't use and probably am not interested in. I would think that others may have similar reactions. Maybe if you took it out? "Building an email client in half an hour with JMAP"? Though that makes it sound like it would work with any email provider. It's not clear that JMAP is a protocol. "Building a JMAP email client in half an hour"? Maybe there's not enough interest in JMAP yet, and a talk that promotes JMAP over IMAP/SMTP would be better first. Maybe the client could be prebuilt and simply presented as part of the talk as FOSS, showing the small LoC that it took and simply mentioning how little time it took. Maybe having it in multiple programming languages would help, too, to show that its simplicity is not a matter of language of choice. Just throwing ideas out there.

kbd 8y ago

> IMAP and POP are just so inadequate that locking yourself into gmail/whatever is a reasonable choice. Totally agree that email protocols need improvement, but there are other benefits to gmail. I'm always going to want reliable service and storage, good spam filtering (and gmail's scale allows them to do that potentially better than anybody), and the interface is pretty good. I can even use my own domain.

tjoff 8y ago
Step 1 is a good backup. With JMAP that could be done for any provider, can you with gmail? The solutions that I've seen all seem like hacks. But I have yet to try it so I could be very wrong. But please let me know if there is a decent alternative, I'm about to migrate a google account. I'd hope most decent providers let you use your own domain... It's easy to think gmail spam filtering is good if you never check the spam folder. It has filtered out some very important mails for me and others so I do my very best to disable it. Create a filter for "is:spam" and "Never send it to Spam" is the best solution I know. But despite this google might remove mails anyway.
- kbd 8y ago
  The spam filtering isn't perfect (can't think of any false negatives, but some false positives. I hedged with "potentially" above) but I receive very little spam so I just check the folder when I get one. And this is with an old school catch-all domain setting too. I haven't looked into backing up gmail.
- jfb 8y ago
  I've had good success using mbsync to back up a variety of IMAP provided email services. It's not perfect, and does require a little bit of fiddling, but once it's set up, it Just Works™ the way it should. I've even used it to move ~300k mails from Google to Fastmail.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I had a lot of custom spam rules on Gmail because Google takes the opinion of the masses to decide how to filter. Since FastMail's personalized spam filter kicked in, which is based on my opinion, I've never had to make hard rules for FastMail spam handling. Another big advantage is that their spam data aggregation is optional, unlike Gmail's, and solely uses the content of confirmed spam (aka, you permanently deleted it) to refine their data, so no personal data is getting hoovered up with it. I did actually shut off offering up my spam data to the masses on FastMail, because I realized I had an edge case where the filters defining my spam as spam for everyone could be harmful. As far as backup, I have a local Microsoft Outlook which I open every so often which pulls down all the email. I wouldn't mind a Google Takeout-esque download feature from FastMail at some point too though.

tracker1 8y ago

I'm hoping for the same... I started down the rabbit hole of creating a mail server/client once. Regarding IMAP, all I can say is damn, that is a pain and I pretty much gave it all up. Smartermail is probably as close as I've seen to what I'd love to see as a more broad open-source product for mail. I just don't have the patience to wire together a half dozen systems, the maintenance and more to have working email... I have one address hosted via outlook.com (relic from when they had a free tier for personal domains), and the bulk of email is via gmail. I have mail forwards in google domains for a few really old email addresses (just used it the other day to recover an old account). But for the most part, I would love to see some better personal mail options. I've roughly looked at some of the mail in a box stuff, but I don't want all of DNS and the world for the domain controlled under my mail server.