"And before you know it, the protocol is bloated as hell and you've basically reinvented HTTP." I don't think this assertion makes sense. If it's JSON over HTT

"And before you know it, the protocol is bloated as hell and you've basically reinvented HTTP." I don't think this assertion makes sense. If it's JSON over HTTP (as you've said above), why would they need to reinvent HTTP to achieve any of the stuff they're trying to achieve? They already have all of HTTP to choose from, no need to reinvent it. And, you've made a lot of claims based on some kind of slippery slope argument (which is a fallacy). I think it would be educational for everyone talking on this subject to spend some time learning a bit about the existing protocols in the space. SMTP is messy, and shows its age in a lot of regards (character encoding complexity, transfer of large data, authentication of sending servers, etc.). IMAP is somewhat less messy and slightly more modern, but still quite old. Neither protocol is well-tuned for modern email usage. I don't know that JMAP will solve it, but given how much effort is going into web tools, both on the server and client side, and how many more people have experience developing with HTTP, I don't see any reason to not leverage that for email, too.