JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really • Hacker News Board

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#151

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

catdog wrote: post #145

bad_user wrote: post #40

FastMail is behind this protocol and from what I've read JMAP has evolved out of their web interface. I've been a happy customer, even though lately I flirted with going back to GSuite for my personal email, but after a trial realized that Gmail does many things well, except for being a good email service. So I went back to FastMail and renewed for another 2 years. Seeing this new protocol is exciting, because JMAP i…

> Also from what I understand JMAP should be friendly for mobile usage. They kept notifications out of it, you're supposed to implement notifications using whatever the mobile platform provides. Interacting via JMAP is via plain HTTP requests, which is super cool. Sounds actually not cool. Is there really no standardized way to do notifications? The world consists not only of shitty mobile walled gardens which insist…

Using what is provided by mobile operating systems is the standard. FastMail is decoupling JMAP from notifications because it's a sound architectural decision for that reason.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#152

Post by toast0 » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

eggsampler wrote: post #110

bad_user wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPF/DKIM are designed to prevent spam and not to prevent spoofing of From. There is a difference. SPF has nothing to do with the From header. And the DKIM signature does not have to match the sender’s domain, the signature can be that of any domain. This means that for practical purposes, anybody can send spoofed emails. That an email is signed with DKIM, that doesn’t mean much and it is meant to build a web of trust…

Sure, I get that. I get there is a whole weird and wacky world of email use that is considered legitimate and needs to work that way for a myriad of reasons. I don't get why their MTA cannot at least have an option to reject mail from your domains if it's not being sent using your account credentials. The average layperson will not get that. I'm fairly sure if my mother received an email that wasn't delivered to a th…

At this point, none of the mainstream email websites or applications even show the From address, just the name that came on the email, or what matches from your address book. So, I fully expect people to get mail from webmaster@johnssportsupplyemporium.example.org with a From name vaguely related to me and assume I sent it.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#153

Post by arendtio » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

Leace wrote: post #64

arendtio wrote: post #62

To give some context on why JMAP is relevant today, you might want to read this answer in the conversations FAQ [1]. It basically states that XMPP powered Apps are having trouble fighting against the battery saving software because XMPP is stateful. JMAP, on the other hand, is stateless. As protocols are meant to connect different implementations and bringing more protocols for the same task quickly hurts the interop…

Note that "RESTful" in JMAP's case means "everything over JSON HTTP POST", methods to be invoked are embedded in the JSON request. As for XMPP battery consumption I didn't see major problems, Conversations.im is always <1% (I just checked and it shows 0%). On the other hand Conversations can use push to optimize battery usage.

Yes, in fact, there is absolutely no reason to restrict well-built apps like conversations from consuming battery automatically. Even without Google Push Notifications the battery consumption is quite good.

So it is pretty obvious that the vendor built battery optimization software does more bad than good.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#154

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

hardwaresofton wrote: post #150

PaulHoule wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is "good enough". The real hole is "instant messaging". Somehow every few years we got from ICQ to AIM to Paltalk to Skype to Facebook Messenger to Slack to ... (at least Altassian had the decency to take HipChat behind the woodshed and shoot it) The strange thing is that these services dry up, blow away, get replaced, but they don't seem to improve on what came before. There is a standard, XMPP, but the only p…

I didn't explain it fully, but the alternate future I was imagining was one where SMTP could evolve/instantiate a connection for "ASAP email" -- AKA instant messaging. Kinda like how HTTP can upgrade to websockets. There would obviously be a lot to work out, but if something like this was in the SMTP standard (or at least introduced), I think eventually email providers would race to differentiate themselves with supp…

I don't want instant messaging in my email though. If you need synchronous communications, use a chat client.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#155

Post by miracle2k » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #105

majewsky wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most mail clients are running on mobile (judging by number of devices). Long-running connections on mobile are a bad idea because of network reliability and battery concerns.

Hu? Constantly establishing new connections saves power vs. maintaining one estalished connection? Could you explain how that works? And could you also explain how constantly making new connections makes things work more reliably over unreliable links? Like, does that allow you to transfer data when the network link is down? Does the fact that inside the TLS/TCP connection data is transferred via HTTP instead of IMAP…

Webmail was limited by HTTP, but not because HTTP is stateless; rather, it's because no mail server speaks HTTP, which means every webmail has to implement it's own IMAP proxy, and IMAP as a protocol is very, very bad if you don't want to sync emails to your local machine and thus keep your own copy of the whole mailbox state.

On the other hand, JMAP does allow you to get push notifications on changes, outside of the normal HTTP API.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#156

Post by kitsunesoba » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #127

hardwaresofton wrote: post #3

I really want to see some innovation in the email space. The landscape is like a sea of false promises and dashed dreams. SMTP is one of the bread-and-butters of the internet, yet it just doesn't seem to be moving forward (maybe that's for the best), and no one's building extensions on top of it. Maybe I'm naive in thinking it was possible but we could have avoided this whole "make an account on X messenger so we can…

Email is "good enough". The real hole is "instant messaging". Somehow every few years we got from ICQ to AIM to Paltalk to Skype to Facebook Messenger to Slack to ... (at least Altassian had the decency to take HipChat behind the woodshed and shoot it) The strange thing is that these services dry up, blow away, get replaced, but they don't seem to improve on what came before. There is a standard, XMPP, but the only p…

XMPP’s problem isn’t that people don’t care about it. Its problem is a double whammy of having zero branding/mindspace presence and being too technical for many users to bother with.

The second point is especially big. People expect to be pointed to a singular app/site, not “choose whichever client you like”. Your average Joe just doesn’t conceptualize services as being separate from clients in the first place, and even if they did having to choose a client is a dead end.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#157

Post by mehrdadn » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

eggsampler wrote: post #54

bad_user wrote: post #40

FastMail is behind this protocol and from what I've read JMAP has evolved out of their web interface. I've been a happy customer, even though lately I flirted with going back to GSuite for my personal email, but after a trial realized that Gmail does many things well, except for being a good email service. So I went back to FastMail and renewed for another 2 years. Seeing this new protocol is exciting, because JMAP i…

I've been a happy Fastmail customer too, until I was made aware that you can impersonate other Fastmail customers by just spoofing the email address. Their servers just happily accept it. SPF and DKIM all pass with flying colours, and the only way you'd know it's happened is if you have DMARC on and happen to notice a pass in the report you don't remember sending. Well, that is if the recipient doesn't reply to the s…

...wow. Do you have any recommendations for alternatives?

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#158

Post by oarsinsync » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

distances wrote: post #132

oarsinsync wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would (imnsho opinion) have fixed spam is sender pays. I've debated this with a lot of people. We're 50/50 on it. Fifty agree with me, fifty million don't. Along with the billions of spam SMS that are also supposed to be sender-pays, sadly

Is this in the US? I've had SIM cards in three European countries, never received a spam SMS.

I've experienced this primarily in two European countries, as well as the Americas (both north and south) and east Asia.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#159

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

amaranth wrote: post #146

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hu? Constantly establishing new connections saves power vs. maintaining one estalished connection? Could you explain how that works? And could you also explain how constantly making new connections makes things work more reliably over unreliable links? Like, does that allow you to transfer data when the network link is down? Does the fact that inside the TLS/TCP connection data is transferred via HTTP instead of IMAP…

> Constantly establishing new connections saves power vs. maintaining one estalished connection? Could you explain how that works? If you maintain a connection you have a leave the modem powered. If you connect every so often (1 minute, 10 minutes, whatever) the modem can be powered down in between. The modem and the screen are the top two users of power in a phone so this is a big win.

Sorry, but that makes no sense. Keeping a TCP connection in established state does not require any modem to be powered. I even suspend my laptop with established SSH connections over night, to disk, so it's completely powered off, I could even disconnect the power supply and take out the battery for the night. When I power it back on, the SSH sessions are still working perfectly fine, after hours of being powered down, and that is completely unsurprising, given how TCP works.

The only thing that requires leaving the modem powered on is if you want to be able to receive something. But tearing down the connection obviously doesn't help with that. When the modem is powered down, you won't be able to receive anything more by not having an established TCP connection.

So, no, that does not explain how doing more work saves power.

Re: JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really

#160

Post by rakoo » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #5

hardwaresofton wrote: post #3

I really want to see some innovation in the email space. The landscape is like a sea of false promises and dashed dreams. SMTP is one of the bread-and-butters of the internet, yet it just doesn't seem to be moving forward (maybe that's for the best), and no one's building extensions on top of it. Maybe I'm naive in thinking it was possible but we could have avoided this whole "make an account on X messenger so we can…

"if someone had just jammed XMPP and SMTP together" - wasn't that kind of what Google Wave was aiming for?

Further than that, it seems to me SMTP is functionally included inside XMPP so there's no need in mixing them. Perhaps having an SMTP gateway that feeds into an XMPP server at most.