8 ms·

Ten Years of JMAP

103 points by wycx 2y ago

andrewshadura 2y ago
I wish JMAP was more widely supported on the client side. None of the clients I use support it, sadly.
- hyhconito 2y ago
  That’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 2y ago
    I’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_black https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_b...
    - hyhconito 2y ago
      It'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.
      - jeltz 2y ago
        And that one is JMAP. IMAP is such a huge clusterfuck it is almost impossible to beat it.
        otabdeveloper4 2y ago
        IMAP is simple and elegant and not a "clusterfuck" at all. (Source: implemented both serverside and clientside IMAP.) IMAP is basically a database query language and as such it works as it should.
        brongondwana 2y ago
        IMAP is both excellent and, annoyingly inconsistent so it's much more of a pain to develop reliable parsers for. I'm pretty happy to use IMAP generally, but I'm also... MODSEQ is wrapped with a () in some places, not but STATUS HIGHESTMODSEQ: . SELECT INBOX.Archive * 1239 EXISTS * 0 RECENT * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe) * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe \*)] Ok * OK [UNSEEN 1221] Ok * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1108730350] Ok * OK [UIDNEXT 2231] Ok * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] Ok * OK [MAILBOXID (210306ee-5833-456b-bede-6d04757128b3)] Ok * OK [URLMECH INTERNAL] Ok * OK [ANNOTATIONS 65536] Ok . OK [READ-WRITE] Completed . FETCH 1 MODSEQ * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] CONDSTORE enabled by FETCH MODSEQ * 1 FETCH (MODSEQ (39570709)) . OK Completed (0.000 sec) And... the * operator ranges. . FETCH 2231:* (UID MODSEQ) * 1239 FETCH (UID 2230 MODSEQ (40306872)) . OK Completed (0.001 sec) Source: have also implemented both client and server side IMAP, and reviewed RFC9051 very closely.
        jeltz 2y ago
        So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there? I have tried a lot of clients and nobody has managed an implementstion which is works well in practice. And it is a pretty bad query language compared to something like SQL.
        otabdeveloper4 2y ago
        > So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there? Yes. Regardless of the email protocol, third-party clients will always be horrible as long as corporations view email as their enterprise moat.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Email 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 2y ago
      Nailed it.
- mcny 2y ago
  On 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 2y ago
    You can use https://stalw.art 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 https://mailtemi.com) and have run equal tests against stalw.art locally as well as Fastmail.
    - amaccuish 2y ago
      But there’s no calendar or contacts support with stalwart right?
      - Mailtemi 2y ago
        Neither Fastmail's JMAP for third-party apps nor Stalw.art supports Contacts/Calendars yet. Fastmail said that it will be enabled once it passes IETF standardization. Stalw.art also mentioned they will add support after the standard is finalized.
gjmveloso 2y ago
JMAP 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 2y ago
  Sadly, 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 2y ago
    Besides, MS already have their own solution that goes way beyond just mail: Microsoft Graph
    - Mailtemi 2y ago
      MSGraph 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...
      - CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
        No doubt JMAP is superior for the problem it solves. I wonder if it will matter in the end though. I have the impression MS is positioning it self to be the only viable AI platform where mail and calendars are just a tiny part of that. So while not really competing in the same domain it may be that both IMAP and JMAP may feel as relevant to the world as IRC or XMPP in the not too distant future.
AnonC 2y ago
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). 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 2y 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. 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 2y 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) 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: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_IMAP_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_IMAP_server * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers
rawkode 2y ago
I 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
- ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
  I don't get your point. Fastmail provide, foremost, an email service. Boring is good here. Exciting and shiny I don't need.
  - rawkode 2y ago
    Then you are also fine with IMAP. No new protocol needed.
    - ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
      I'm happy with pop too.
    - chillfox 2y ago
      Nope, 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.
      - louis-lau 2y ago
        My anecdote is that that has never happened to me and all IMAP clients seem fairly stable to me. Do with that information what you will.
userbinator 2y ago
This? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol 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 2y ago
  POP3 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 2y ago
    POP3 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 2y ago
      If 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ljoshua 2y ago
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! 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.
deleted 2y ago
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solarkraft 2y ago
I 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/ https://stalw.art/) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.

Ten Years of JMAP

103 points by wycx 2y ago

andrewshadura 2y ago

I wish JMAP was more widely supported on the client side. None of the clients I use support it, sadly.

hyhconito 2y ago
That’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 2y ago
  I’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_black https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_b...
  - hyhconito 2y ago
    It'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.
    - jeltz 2y ago
      And that one is JMAP. IMAP is such a huge clusterfuck it is almost impossible to beat it.
      - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
        IMAP is simple and elegant and not a "clusterfuck" at all. (Source: implemented both serverside and clientside IMAP.) IMAP is basically a database query language and as such it works as it should.
        brongondwana 2y ago
        IMAP is both excellent and, annoyingly inconsistent so it's much more of a pain to develop reliable parsers for. I'm pretty happy to use IMAP generally, but I'm also... MODSEQ is wrapped with a () in some places, not but STATUS HIGHESTMODSEQ: . SELECT INBOX.Archive * 1239 EXISTS * 0 RECENT * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe) * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe \*)] Ok * OK [UNSEEN 1221] Ok * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1108730350] Ok * OK [UIDNEXT 2231] Ok * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] Ok * OK [MAILBOXID (210306ee-5833-456b-bede-6d04757128b3)] Ok * OK [URLMECH INTERNAL] Ok * OK [ANNOTATIONS 65536] Ok . OK [READ-WRITE] Completed . FETCH 1 MODSEQ * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] CONDSTORE enabled by FETCH MODSEQ * 1 FETCH (MODSEQ (39570709)) . OK Completed (0.000 sec) And... the * operator ranges. . FETCH 2231:* (UID MODSEQ) * 1239 FETCH (UID 2230 MODSEQ (40306872)) . OK Completed (0.001 sec) Source: have also implemented both client and server side IMAP, and reviewed RFC9051 very closely.
        jeltz 2y ago
        So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there? I have tried a lot of clients and nobody has managed an implementstion which is works well in practice. And it is a pretty bad query language compared to something like SQL.
        otabdeveloper4 2y ago
        > So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there? Yes. Regardless of the email protocol, third-party clients will always be horrible as long as corporations view email as their enterprise moat.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Email 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 2y ago
    Nailed it.
mcny 2y ago
On 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 2y ago
  You can use https://stalw.art 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 https://mailtemi.com) and have run equal tests against stalw.art locally as well as Fastmail.
  - amaccuish 2y ago
    But there’s no calendar or contacts support with stalwart right?
    - Mailtemi 2y ago
      Neither Fastmail's JMAP for third-party apps nor Stalw.art supports Contacts/Calendars yet. Fastmail said that it will be enabled once it passes IETF standardization. Stalw.art also mentioned they will add support after the standard is finalized.

gjmveloso 2y ago

JMAP 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 2y ago
Sadly, 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 2y ago
  Besides, MS already have their own solution that goes way beyond just mail: Microsoft Graph
  - Mailtemi 2y ago
    MSGraph 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...
    - CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
      No doubt JMAP is superior for the problem it solves. I wonder if it will matter in the end though. I have the impression MS is positioning it self to be the only viable AI platform where mail and calendars are just a tiny part of that. So while not really competing in the same domain it may be that both IMAP and JMAP may feel as relevant to the world as IRC or XMPP in the not too distant future.

AnonC 2y ago

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). 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 2y 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. 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 2y 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) 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: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_IMAP_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_IMAP_server * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers

rawkode 2y ago

I 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

ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
I don't get your point. Fastmail provide, foremost, an email service. Boring is good here. Exciting and shiny I don't need.
- rawkode 2y ago
  Then you are also fine with IMAP. No new protocol needed.
  - ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
    I'm happy with pop too.
  - chillfox 2y ago
    Nope, 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.
    - louis-lau 2y ago
      My anecdote is that that has never happened to me and all IMAP clients seem fairly stable to me. Do with that information what you will.

userbinator 2y ago

This? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol 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 2y ago
POP3 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 2y ago
  POP3 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 2y ago
    If 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ljoshua 2y ago

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! 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 2y ago

I 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/ https://stalw.art/) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.