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COI – Chat Over IMAP

coi-dev.org

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Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#41

Post by lima »

Arathorn wrote: post #29

> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this t…

In reality, those bridges work badly and hardly anyone uses them. I had to give up on my attempt at using Matrix as IRC client - it had questionable uptime and some channels even banned Matrix users due to frequent reconnects (on Freenode).

Hackint recently shut down their Matrix bridge due to how maintenance-intensive it was (and the fact that it logged all messages in its own database).

It's great in theory but impractical to use.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#43

Post by jonnycomputer »

Freak_NL wrote: post #36
tompccs wrote: post #13

I think this could be a great solution, but consider going after Slack rather than Whatsapp to being with. Unusually I think enterprise customers will make better early adopters than consumers, as they don't care about network effects and their technological inertia actually aligns with your selling point - that it is a thin protocol on top of email. Once people use this for their professional email address they may…

The alternative for Slack is MatterMost, which you can host on-premise, and is free. I can heartedly recommend it. It's just not an urgent a problem as this is.

I've ran a mattermost instance for several years now. Works pretty well, actually better as the years have gone by.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#44

Post by Yetanfou »

dmacvicar wrote: post #22

How is this different from https://delta.chat ?

Delta Chat is here, now, and has been for a while. It works on Android, Linux, MacOS and is being developed for iOS (limited function beta is available). There is no Windows client yet as far as I know. Delta chat has a simple and concise website which quickly comes to the point and does not try to upsell anything.

This... has a 'modern' website and not much more. The site starts with a page-filling image of a happy woman in an urban environment, she's clearly exited over something the lighted slab in her hand presents her. The thing sorely missing from the site is the download link and the link to the source repository where all those dreams are made true. It does contain one interesting piece of information though:

> COI for Developers

COI is the only ecosystem that provides openness, a strong messaging basis AND overcomes the network effect. With COI you don’t need to develop, host and maintain your own communication servers. Thanks to Delta Chat Core, as a client developer you do not even need to deal with IMAP directly.

Thanks to Delta Chat core... in other words, this is based on Delta Chat. According to one of the project founders they are cooperating with Delta Chat to ensure interoperability [1].

[1] https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/chat_over_imap/ - "...We cooperate with Delta Chat open source project to bundle efforts and ensure interoperability. ..."

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#45

Post by enough »

Arathorn wrote: post #29

> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this t…

Very true, but have you tried just reaching out to someone via email on Matrix in practice? I tried with Riot and am not able to do that. Maybe just a bug, but if you want the real Matrix experience, you need a Matrix account. Don't get me wrong, I do love Matrix, but I also love XMPP - both not spectacular successes so far. AFAIK, the French Matrix version is even locked down and does not federate across the network.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#46

Post by enough »

elvecinodeabajo wrote: post #28

I really like the idea, but I prefer dedicated self-hosted services like Matrix. You can run a suspicious Matrix instance, but I think privacy falls away as you talk to any Gmail user via CoI. "With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice!" I don't find that so problematic. People just needs to see a bit the inner…

You can also run your own mail servers, even non-technical people could do that with for example https://thehelm.com/. Haven't tried it out myself, though.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#47

Post by Arathorn »

lima wrote: post #41
Arathorn wrote: post #29

> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this t…

In reality, those bridges work badly and hardly anyone uses them. I had to give up on my attempt at using Matrix as IRC client - it had questionable uptime and some channels even banned Matrix users due to frequent reconnects (on Freenode). Hackint recently shut down their Matrix bridge due to how maintenance-intensive it was (and the fact that it logged all messages in its own database). It's great in theory but imp…

This info is a bit stale - it's true we had stability problems in Freenode until July 2018 (exasperated by their spam issues), but since then it's been pretty stable and the reconnects are considerably rarer than freenode netsplits. It's not perfect, but many people use it fine as a casual IRC client. There are over 24,000 active users using the Freenode bridge in the last month, for instance, so I'm unsure that 'hardly anyone uses them'...

The Hackint story is a different one; the bridge itself is not maintenance intensive at all. But it is true that the default Matrix server implementation is resource & relatively admin heavy; we're working on that currently. Meanwhile we're also fixing the data retention behaviour - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc176... etc.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#48

Post by davewritescode »

vermilingua wrote: post #2

Are Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other large email providers likely to implement a protocol like this into their own servers? It seems like a major conflict of interest, and without them it is a massive portion of the market that will never see this service work.

I've browsed through the spec and it looks like servers likely won't need to change anything. Most of the interaction between clients happens via mail headers.

I really like this idea

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#49

Post by JustSomeNobody »

supermatt wrote: post #16
kfwhp wrote: post #9

Very bad choice of design for the website. I'm supposed to be interested in this, but this website looks like they're trying to sell me some multi-million contract.

Maybe we are looking at different websites (im viewing from a desktop), but I found it very easy to read and access the information I required.

Too much white space. They could have condensed it quite a bit. And who needs a hero image that big anyway? That was "modern" when people just started using the word "modern". Like using the word "modern" now, it's pretty dated.

Re: COI – Chat Over IMAP

#50

Post by enough »

Freak_NL wrote: post #39
amaccuish wrote: post #33

This is great and all, but you're relying on IMAP, an inherently mobile-unfriendly protocol. They should have worked with Fastmail to get this into JMAP.

I would have pointed you to their issue tracker, but all I can find is a horrible Confluence wiki. Kind of discouraging for potential contributors. There is a mailing list though. At the very least they might add a 'why not (also) JMAP' bullet point to the website if you ask about it: > […] join the COI developer mailing list by sending a mail to dev-join@coi-dev.org. I would guess that they need IMAP to prevent the…

The specs will soon be available on GitHub soon. If the server supports JMAP, there are no principle obstacles to also support COI over JMAP. But as said, currently the market share of JMAP is neglible.
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