FastMail continue to impress me. Good work folks.
JMAP – a better way to email
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#42JMAP is a rather misleading name. "J" is misleading because it's not JSON that distinguishes JMAP from IMAP, but rather the use of HTTP, along with recently added HTTP features such as push. JSON is just the message packing scheme. HTTP is what does all the heavy lifting. "M" is misleading because this protocol is designed for a lot more than mail. It also handles contacts and calendars, and I wouldn't be surprised i…
"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.
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#43Wasn't there a startup recently that pivoted from being a mail client into building a generalized API for interfacing with mail services like gmail/yahoo/outlook? I forgot the name but I'm super interested in efforts like this. I have the feeling the next big social network disruption is going to be leveraging e-mail in a big way. E-mail is the established quasi-p2p (it's a network of centralized services) platform t…
Inbox (MIT and Dropbox): http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/07/mit-and-dropbox-alums-launc... https://www.inboxapp.com/
We didn't pivot. ;)
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#44Neat. Two questions about the digest: 1. You recommend using a digest of the message to generate the message ID. Did you consider mandating that scheme or going farther and using a Merkle tree for the mailbox representation? It seems like this would allow for generating single requests that can fetch all new items. 2. Why SHA-1? Edit: Also, thanks for keeping Fastmail running. As a customer of about ten years it's mu…
No mandated format for message-ID. If you are proxying an existing store with a stable message-ID, you can just use that. My partially written gmail proxy uses the MSGID from Gmail, for example.
SHA1 was a good balance between speed and unforgability at the time. There's still no known collision, and I'm working on putting a piece of randomness into the LMTP headers that are added to every message on delivery into Cyrus to make it even safer.
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#45Why would you create a new email protocol without an encryption requirement? I understand trying to fix the existing protocol problems but one of the biggest is plaintext.
Its expected that you'll run JMAP over HTTPS which takes care of the wire encryption. For end-to-end encryption, there's a heap of problems that still aren't solved (key distribution, need for content analysis). There's no reason JMAP couldn't be extended in the future to support these via additional properties, attached encrypted payloads, etc but mandating it from the outset would quickly see the whole protocol dea…
>key distribution
GPG key servers?
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its expected that you'll run JMAP over HTTPS which takes care of the wire encryption. For end-to-end encryption, there's a heap of problems that still aren't solved (key distribution, need for content analysis). There's no reason JMAP couldn't be extended in the future to support these via additional properties, attached encrypted payloads, etc but mandating it from the outset would quickly see the whole protocol dea…
>key distribution GPG key servers?
And how do you trust those? And if I'm a brand new user, how do I get my key in there?
All the moving parts probably exist, but so far no one has pulled it together into something that a random person off the street can use.
Its not the problem JMAP is trying to solve.
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#47http://xkcd.com/927/
My presentation to the Thunderbird folks led with that, and we would have used it at Inbox Love too if we'd had time, but a 5 minute presentation had to get straight to the point.
It's a good comic. Good point.
We didn't take this decision lightly. There are significant reasons why all the existing standards don't do what's needed, and we made sure we built a technology preview and used it in the real world first - check the video or try out FastMail yourself.
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#48Great job guys! Things like this together with CalDAV and CardDAV are reasons why I pay you guys for service. I just tried the following experiments with my Gmail and FastMail account. There's a reason why FastMail just feels faster! Try this: 1) While having the Gmail iOS app open, mark an email as read on the web 2) See how long it takes for Gmail to reflect the change 3) Now try with FastMail iOS app, see that it'…
Thank you for this comment. I do wonder why they simply didn't say this at the beginning of the article. I understood what they were up to purely because I'm a technical guy, but still I didn't want to actually have to watch the video -- namely because I'm deaf, and far too often there's no captions to explain what's going on so I prefer to read (and so do people at work, school, no sound etc), and it takes a lot less time!
I'm really considering moving from Google Apps to Fastmail... who else has made this jump? Totally worth it?
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#49Amazing. Modern, innovative, service-oriented products and a business model based on customers giving the company money in return for services. I hope that this is a reminder to startups out there that you don't have to trick customers into handing over their personal information all the while pretending to offer your services "for free", in order to gain market share and be profitable. The "traditional" business mod…
I hope you're right but I fear that Fastmail isn't successful in a way that startup founders are going for. Advancing technology unfortunately isn't a priority for most founders.
Re: JMAP – a better way to email
#50Amazing. Modern, innovative, service-oriented products and a business model based on customers giving the company money in return for services. I hope that this is a reminder to startups out there that you don't have to trick customers into handing over their personal information all the while pretending to offer your services "for free", in order to gain market share and be profitable. The "traditional" business mod…
I hope you're right but I fear that Fastmail isn't successful in a way that startup founders are going for. Advancing technology unfortunately isn't a priority for most founders.
We're fully owned by the staff, with no external funding. We've been nicely profitable since the beginning. Not huge profits but enough to pay for a nice office, decent salaries and few gadgets.
So yes, if your goal is to attract massive amounts of venture capital and then get bought out, don't copy us. If you want to have some fun doing something you love without having to worry about anything else then this is definitely the way to do it :)