JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
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Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#2This is very exciting! It's been a long time coming.
Should we take this IETF blog post as an indication that the standardization work is almost done?
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#3Does it solve SPAM problem?
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#4Does it solve SPAM problem?
I haven't read JMAP, but I don't think that's the problem it's tackling.
Also, I think SPAM is as solved as it can be with blacklists, heuristics-based filtering software like spamassasin, and personal filtering with sieve scripts. What else would anyone suggest?
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#5I clicked on this with a lot of hope — alas, this only seems to address the "mailbox access" part of E-mail. I think that part actually works fairly well today (not optimally, but well enough in practice). The part that really needs fixing is SMTP.
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#6Does it solve SPAM problem?
Completely different part of e-mail (client to server), so no.
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#7I clicked on this with a lot of hope — alas, this only seems to address the "mailbox access" part of E-mail. I think that part actually works fairly well today (not optimally, but well enough in practice). The part that really needs fixing is SMTP.
> I think that part actually works fairly well today (not optimally, but well enough in practice).
I haven't done much with IMAP, but I did setup a watcher for my mailboxes that uses the IDLE extension. I consider it a flaw that I need to create a separate connection, each needing their own session, for each folder I want to watch simultaneously. Servers understandably limit the amount of simultaneous connections you can have, so that limits the amount of folders you can watch simultaneously.
I don't know if JMAP fixes that, and I don't know if I'd prefer JMAP over IMAP as a protocol, but there are things that could be better with IMAP.
> The part that really needs fixing is SMTP.
What's wrong with SMTP?
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#8I clicked on this with a lot of hope — alas, this only seems to address the "mailbox access" part of E-mail. I think that part actually works fairly well today (not optimally, but well enough in practice). The part that really needs fixing is SMTP.
IMAP is a really broken protocol; I'd characterize it as a database synchronization protocol that wasn't designed to be one. You need to rely on certain extensions to have a hope of being bug-free [1], and even those can be problematic (UIDVALIDITY changed, gotta clear your entire inbox!).
[1] The IMAP protocol used to rely heavily on message sequence numbers, where each message in the folder was numbered sequentially from 1-N, and deleting messages caused all subsequent messages to have their number decremented by one. But you can have multiple connections active on the same mailbox, and you can't always immediately notify the other connections of when things get deleted, so every connection can have a slightly different mapping. So everyone uses UIDs now, which are guaranteed to be unique, until the server feels like deleting them all and restarting from scratch (i.e., updating UIDVALIDITY), so every message has a different UID now.
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#9I clicked on this with a lot of hope — alas, this only seems to address the "mailbox access" part of E-mail. I think that part actually works fairly well today (not optimally, but well enough in practice). The part that really needs fixing is SMTP.
If your inbox is say, 50 gigs. 100 gigs, larger, emails from the early 90s until today, IMAP as it's applied today is definitely broken for those sized mailboxes. The problem with email for the last few decades is that it has not scaled as our storage use as scaled expotentially up, message size limits have been low, and deliverability issues have gotten worse, not better.
Re: JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
#10I clicked on this with a lot of hope — alas, this only seems to address the "mailbox access" part of E-mail. I think that part actually works fairly well today (not optimally, but well enough in practice). The part that really needs fixing is SMTP.
IMAP is a really broken protocol; I'd characterize it as a database synchronization protocol that wasn't designed to be one. You need to rely on certain extensions to have a hope of being bug-free [1], and even those can be problematic (UIDVALIDITY changed, gotta clear your entire inbox!). [1] The IMAP protocol used to rely heavily on message sequence numbers, where each message in the folder was numbered sequentiall…
Where UID is used now sounds like a good use case for UUIDs (or GUIDs?) that don't ever change.