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JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

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Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#101

Post by toomim »

9dev wrote: post #6

While JMAP seems to scratch every itch of a sucker for proper web API design, I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP. Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days? Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange f…

> Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days?

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are binary protocols. And if you replace the JSON with CBOR, then even the payload becomes binary.

The reason for using HTTP is that the semantics are right. HTTP is a state transfer protocol, and ultimately, that's 90% of what you need for sync.

The other 10% is for subscriptions, updates, with versioning, and patches. You can get these by adding the Braid extensions (see braid.org) which upgrade HTTP from a state transfer to a state synchronization protocol. (I work on Braid.)

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#102

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

solarkraft wrote: post #97

Stalwart is, from what I’ve read, an excellent JMAP server. JMAP is, from what I’ve read, a great protocol for building an E-Mail (and now also others) client on top of. Since I would like an innovative way to access my E-Mails, but do not want to self-host, I would find it interesting to use Stalwart as the server component of an E-Mail client : Data is somehow synced into Stalwart via the “ugly” protocols and I get…

I have been looking for something like this for ages. Everything I found so far is overpriced, so this is great development.

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#103

Post by keeganpoppen »

solarkraft wrote: post #97

Stalwart is, from what I’ve read, an excellent JMAP server. JMAP is, from what I’ve read, a great protocol for building an E-Mail (and now also others) client on top of. Since I would like an innovative way to access my E-Mails, but do not want to self-host, I would find it interesting to use Stalwart as the server component of an E-Mail client : Data is somehow synced into Stalwart via the “ugly” protocols and I get…

i have also been pondering this for the exact same reason... unfortunately, i don't have much to show for said pondering... yet...

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#104

Post by calvinmorrison »

solarkraft wrote: post #93

Reading weirdly many “but there are no clients” posts. Of course something has to come first. You can’t really develop a client without a server implementation and Stalwart is essentially the first server implementation of JMAP. With Stalwart in place, there’s finally a reason to develop a client for JMAP. I hope y’all are aware that Mozilla’s new mail service will use it, so that is likely going to give JMAP a big p…

Cyrus was probably the first

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#105

Post by btown »

9dev wrote: post #6

While JMAP seems to scratch every itch of a sucker for proper web API design, I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP. Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days? Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange f…

My hot take is that if the web had been based on binary protocols rather than HTML and JSON, the fragmentation of tooling that can instead be standardized as view-source and network-tabs would have decimated (as in removed 90% of) the hackers that make up this community, and software engineering in general.

There's no magic. Nothing sacred. Nothing that you aren't allowed to understand, intuitively. Nothing where you aren't allowed to imagine "what if it also had X?" The web is yours. The computer is yours. As an industry, we burn some incremental percentage of bandwidth to give you the keys to the kingdom, and to allow you, new developer, to be one of us.

In an age when LLMs feel like magic boxes to tech-minded people new to development, we need this more than ever.

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#106

Post by dhosek »

20after4 wrote: post #95
7bit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the "old internet" protocols (email, FTP, even HTTP itself) were bootstrapped on top of built-mostly-for-plaintext Telnet. That's just not true. Telnet and SMTP are built on top of TCP. They live on the same layer. They were originally both protocols that transmitted data with printable ascii, hence why they look similar. There are many other protocols like Telnet and SMTP that worked like that, auch as nnt…

I think that the point is this: You could literally use a telnet client to talk to all of those servers and it was considered a good thing, maybe even an essential feature. So protocol design was somehow influenced by the need to be fully plain text ASCII streams (and maybe that other options weren't adequately explored due to this restriction)

You can also telnet into port 80 and communicate with an HTTP server.

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#107

Post by audelair »

solarkraft wrote: post #93

Reading weirdly many “but there are no clients” posts. Of course something has to come first. You can’t really develop a client without a server implementation and Stalwart is essentially the first server implementation of JMAP. With Stalwart in place, there’s finally a reason to develop a client for JMAP. I hope y’all are aware that Mozilla’s new mail service will use it, so that is likely going to give JMAP a big p…

I'm cautiously optimistic that Stalwart is a game-changer. I would normally stick with a simpler platform (like mox) if I wasn't interested in the groupware space. I've previously tried Nextcloud and SoGo and left disappointed, and have more or less been waiting for a project like this to come along.

Nextcloud was such a terrible experience for me (the file sharing/storage was good, but the groupware aspect was incredibly buggy). But knowing that Nextcloud is partnering with Stalwart to hopefully overhaul their stack, Opencloud is developing their JMAP integration, and Mozilla/Thunderbird is using it too (they already have a webmail in development here: https://github.com/thunderbird/stormbox)... we might finally see some exciting development in this space. And now is also a ripe time, as there seems to be a perfect storm of people wanting to get away from Big Tech platforms.

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#108

Post by Avamander »

blacklion wrote: post #84

What next? Replacing Sieve with something cumbersome, but JSON based? There is no good desktop implementation of MUA with old technologies (IMAP, Sieve), will all this JMAP help? I don't think so. What is profit to have good server with new good (assume it is good, I'm not sure, but lets assume) protocols without good client? IMAP4 is underused by modern clients: it allows to effectively store client configuration on…

Solved problem? Dovecot can't handle UTF-8 to this day. Things like Stalwart do try and change that and actually support non-legacy features. (Though I think Stalwart doesn't do IMAP NOTIFY either.)

Clients on the other hand have actually kinda moved forward, Apple Mail works with IMAP servers and offers features that people only got with Gmail before. But there are many other examples as well.

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#109

Post by Avamander »

drnick1 wrote: post #40
lifty wrote: post #8

It’s such a breeze to self-host your own email server using Stalwart. It has been a new era for email self-hosters like myself since these kind of fully integrated email servers like Stalwart appeared. Another good one but not as actively maintained is Maddy.

But is there any real benefit over Postfix + Dovecot other than "it's new and written in Rust?" Postfix and Dovecot have been around for decades and respect the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.

Well yeah, they do one thing, but to do email well you need more than one thing. Dovecot is also kinda shit with UTF-8 support amongst other things. There are plenty of reasons to not use that combination.

Re: JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

#110

Post by frumplestlatz »

isaachinman wrote: post #76
frumplestlatz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible how, exactly? People say things like that, and I wonder if I’ve just been living in a gilded tower of using Apple Mail with decent IMAP server implementations. I’m also pretty familiar with the wire protocol and its implementation — it’s never struck me as particularly horrible. A new protocol isn’t likely to solve the problem of poorly implemented clients and servers — e.g. Google doesn’t really care about…

Gilded tower? Are we living in separate universes? Shameless plug for a client with true offline-first IMAP support: https://marcoapp.io

Sounds like it :) I’ve been very happy with Mail.app since MacOS 10.0. My use has always been with my employer’s IMAP servers, and my own cryus (and eventually) dovecot self-hosted IMAP servers.

Mail.app is what NeXT used internally, and Apple uses to this day AFAIK. Steve Jobs historically paid a lot of attention to it and wasn’t shy about weighing in on any changes.

Most of the complaints that I’ve heard about it seemed to stem from poor IMAP servers (e.g. Gmail), but it sounds like your knowledge in the space would be a lot more detailed and recent than mine, so I would be very interested in your thoughts.

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