6 ms·

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)

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.
      - mort96 2y ago
        I am more than happy to not use an "AI platform" for my e-mail and calendar!
        pas 2y ago
        Sure, and we're the vocal (?) minority here. The SOHO/corporate/family world will uncritically use whatever shit MS regurgitates for them for all the usual reasons.
- stonogo 2y ago
  And they standardized MTA-STS to ensure that you must use web technologies if you want to use email.
- dgeiser13 2y ago
  Gmail supports IMAP.
  - Mailtemi 2y ago
    It does behind CASA!
  - mort96 2y ago
    It does, but IMAP is clearly not a priority, and they certainly aren't interested in JMAP. They support IMAP (with caveats) because you can't really offer e-mail without IMAP, but they want you to use their GMail app.
    - retrochameleon 2y ago
      Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. But Gmail doesn't have "folders". They have "labels". I wont go into all the details about how Gmail labels work that frustrate and annoy me, but the point is that IMAP clients cannot see labels, they can't replicate it on the client end, etc. This caused a legitimate problem at work when the finance dept. wants to use this service that reads emails to automatically scan invoices into their system and whatnot. They wanted to be able to only have a subfolder automatically imported into the program, because too many of the emails were not relevant to get imported, creating more work to clear them out. We were not able to achieve a solution with a simple folder for the users to move emails into to get them imported. Instead, we had to set up a second email account specifically for this importing service, and whenever finance wants something imported, they forward the email to that second account.
      - MaKey 2y ago
        > Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. I think the "NOT" slipped in there by accident.
- joecool1029 2y ago
  What about Amazon? They could do it with AWS. It seems odd now to think they haven't offered a service like this yet.
hyhconito 2y ago
I 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?
- noprocrasted 2y 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 2y ago
    I'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.
    - brongondwana 2y ago
      The big benefit with JMAP is the state strings and /changes operation which allows even in the face of failures to recovery quite cleanly. It's really more a data synchronising protocol (RFC8620) with email support on top (RFC8621) and the new protocols coming in.
      - hyhconito 2y ago
        Section 3.10 of RFC8620 scares me. I know a lot about that and a lot of the complexity around that trite point is missing. Note I've designed and built a complex messaging system that runs over HTTP over unreliable connections and run it in production for 15 years so I know what can and does go wrong. Popcorn at the ready.
throw0101b 2y 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?
- jeltz 2y ago
  Not well. At least Thunderbird with Gmail does not work very well.
  - Snacklive 2y ago
    What are the problems you have faced ? I'm been using Thunderbird for a few months and i haven't notice anything weird
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      I've been using Thunderbird with GMail for 10+ years. The main issue was having to switch to oauth login a while back.
amluto 2y ago
I 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/ 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 2y ago
  Similarly, 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 2y ago
    I'm actually working on this (https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/ https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/). After pushing Mailtemi on Android, I will continue working on full offline support.
    - radicality 2y ago
      That’s awesome, will check it out!
antifarben 2y ago
StalwartMail supports JMAP out of the box

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.
    - mort96 2y ago
      I am more than happy to not use an "AI platform" for my e-mail and calendar!
      - pas 2y ago
        Sure, and we're the vocal (?) minority here. The SOHO/corporate/family world will uncritically use whatever shit MS regurgitates for them for all the usual reasons.
stonogo 2y ago
And they standardized MTA-STS to ensure that you must use web technologies if you want to use email.
dgeiser13 2y ago
Gmail supports IMAP.
- Mailtemi 2y ago
  It does behind CASA!
- mort96 2y ago
  It does, but IMAP is clearly not a priority, and they certainly aren't interested in JMAP. They support IMAP (with caveats) because you can't really offer e-mail without IMAP, but they want you to use their GMail app.
  - retrochameleon 2y ago
    Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. But Gmail doesn't have "folders". They have "labels". I wont go into all the details about how Gmail labels work that frustrate and annoy me, but the point is that IMAP clients cannot see labels, they can't replicate it on the client end, etc. This caused a legitimate problem at work when the finance dept. wants to use this service that reads emails to automatically scan invoices into their system and whatnot. They wanted to be able to only have a subfolder automatically imported into the program, because too many of the emails were not relevant to get imported, creating more work to clear them out. We were not able to achieve a solution with a simple folder for the users to move emails into to get them imported. Instead, we had to set up a second email account specifically for this importing service, and whenever finance wants something imported, they forward the email to that second account.
    - MaKey 2y ago
      > Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. I think the "NOT" slipped in there by accident.
joecool1029 2y ago
What about Amazon? They could do it with AWS. It seems odd now to think they haven't offered a service like this yet.

hyhconito 2y ago

I 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?

noprocrasted 2y 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 2y ago
  I'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.
  - brongondwana 2y ago
    The big benefit with JMAP is the state strings and /changes operation which allows even in the face of failures to recovery quite cleanly. It's really more a data synchronising protocol (RFC8620) with email support on top (RFC8621) and the new protocols coming in.
    - hyhconito 2y ago
      Section 3.10 of RFC8620 scares me. I know a lot about that and a lot of the complexity around that trite point is missing. Note I've designed and built a complex messaging system that runs over HTTP over unreliable connections and run it in production for 15 years so I know what can and does go wrong. Popcorn at the ready.

throw0101b 2y 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?

jeltz 2y ago
Not well. At least Thunderbird with Gmail does not work very well.
- Snacklive 2y ago
  What are the problems you have faced ? I'm been using Thunderbird for a few months and i haven't notice anything weird
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    I've been using Thunderbird with GMail for 10+ years. The main issue was having to switch to oauth login a while back.

amluto 2y ago

I 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/ 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 2y ago
Similarly, 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 2y ago
  I'm actually working on this (https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/ https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/). After pushing Mailtemi on Android, I will continue working on full offline support.
  - radicality 2y ago
    That’s awesome, will check it out!

antifarben 2y ago

StalwartMail supports JMAP out of the box