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Ten Years of JMAP

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Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#61

Post by userbinator »

Fnoord wrote: post #33
userbinator wrote: post #32

This? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol They cited IMAP's complexity, high resource use, JMAP is implemented using JSON APIs over HTTP They complain about complexity, then add another two layers of complexity in their own protocol? I think POP3 is the simplest standard, and have also written a basic IMAP client. Parsing IMAP isn't as easy as a binary protocol, but it's definitely not at the…

POP3 has no locking. It won't work with multiple clients, and that is awful. But I agree with your assessment. We need good utilities which make JSON human-readable, and which turn human-readable into JSON. Might as well not use JSON, except for internal traffic.

POP3 works fine with multiple clients. I've used it that way for several decades. Doesn't need any locking.

JSON is only excusable if your protocol is designed for webmail clients. Otherwise this is a case of the emperor having no clothes.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#62

Post by userbinator »

hyhconito wrote: post #3
andrewshadura wrote: post #2

I wish JMAP was more widely supported on the client side. None of the clients I use support it, sadly.

That’ll be the case in ten years as well. I know a couple of people who run large email stacks (500k+ users) and this isn’t on their radar and there is no interest in it. There is a little disdain as they are comp sci people and don’t like JSON at all (I share that concern). Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.

Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.

And it'd better stay that way, as it's also the most widely used set of standards for communication across borders, that people rely on about as much if not more than traditional telcos now.

(You should know why the common-sense comments are downvoted --- this is basically an advertisement article, and they don't like it when their $shiny_new_thing is actually shown to be worse than the existing solutions. A huge clue is when the adjective "modern" is thrown around like it's a good thing.)

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#63

Post by hyhconito »

spondyl wrote: post #60
hyhconito wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I dumped them because their client was buggy, doesn’t work offline on mobile devices and I had to use IMAP anyway…

> doesn’t work offline on mobile devices To some degree, that isn't true anymore as of last week but of course, you meant when you used it, not generally: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-in-beta/

Oh so some of it works offline.

Useless to me. Seriously.

I write a lot of email on planes and do a lot of email management.

All that works on the default Apple stuff as shipped other than account management. Using IMAP and iCal etc.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#64

Post by Fnoord »

userbinator wrote: post #61
Fnoord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POP3 has no locking. It won't work with multiple clients, and that is awful. But I agree with your assessment. We need good utilities which make JSON human-readable, and which turn human-readable into JSON. Might as well not use JSON, except for internal traffic.

POP3 works fine with multiple clients. I've used it that way for several decades. Doesn't need any locking. JSON is only excusable if your protocol is designed for webmail clients. Otherwise this is a case of the emperor having no clothes.

If only one client writes data or if you constantly do full sync (quite expensive on resources), yes. You can't even have different maps to sort content though. You don't follow states. POP3 just doesn't scale well in the end. If you're in 1995 and you get 3 emails a week and get really excited you got an email, then it works very well (I still hated the full syncs on dialup though). I used POP3 for several years in the 90s, even wrote my own client (a very simple protocol) Then end 90s, I used Pine and then Mutt directly in a shell on my ISP, with IMAP and Maildir; a relief! I've never used JMAP, since 1) I quit self-hosting email due to (justified, given spam) complexity of the stack and 2) I don't use Fastmail but Soverin.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#65

Post by NoahKAndrews »

hyhconito wrote: post #63
spondyl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn’t work offline on mobile devices To some degree, that isn't true anymore as of last week but of course, you meant when you used it, not generally: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-in-beta/

Oh so some of it works offline. Useless to me. Seriously. I write a lot of email on planes and do a lot of email management. All that works on the default Apple stuff as shipped other than account management. Using IMAP and iCal etc.

Have you looked at their list of what doesn't work offline? It seems like it's mainly attachment management limitations than limitations of managing the emails themselves.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#66

Post by snapplebobapple »

jolmg wrote: post #35
chillfox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of their customers, I really appreciate that they don't upend everything all the time with pointless features. Constantly reinventing things and piling on pointless features is one of the things I dislike most about Google, their chat solution is especially egregious for this. It only causes frustration and increases the time investment required to be proficient with the products.

They have added features though. They're just not invasive. They added masked emails, for example. And if I look at the settings right now, I notice they've added customization of what swipes do. I too like the feeling that they're stable. I guess they're just tactful with their additions.

I switched a couple years ago because the masked emails and i was tired of histing anonaddy and i couldnt be happier myself. Easily the best mail provider i have used and i have used a bunch of them (including all the big guys, a provider using zimbra,protonmail, etc)

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#67

Post by hyhconito »

userbinator wrote: post #62
hyhconito wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’ll be the case in ten years as well. I know a couple of people who run large email stacks (500k+ users) and this isn’t on their radar and there is no interest in it. There is a little disdain as they are comp sci people and don’t like JSON at all (I share that concern). Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.

Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is. And it'd better stay that way, as it's also the most widely used set of standards for communication across borders, that people rely on about as much if not more than traditional telcos now. (You should know why the common-sense comments are downvoted --- this is basically an advertisement article, and they don't like it when thei…

Nailed it.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#68

Post by amluto »

gjmveloso wrote: post #5

JMAP is the best email protocol out there that nobody uses (besides Fastmail), sadly. It would be great that the two big email providers (Google and Microsoft) implemented and supported it. It would make so easier and reliable to have a single client that works really well across personal and business email accounts, for example.

I have no idea whether JMAP is any good, but I find all the hype utterly baffling. JMAP is supposedly awesome. There is real thoughtful engineering going into offline support: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-mail-storage/

And yet: at least as of a couple months ago, there isn’t actually any offline support! The Fastmail first party app does not work at all offline. Complete failure. Does not even try. Oh, and it has dramatically worse threading support than even Gmail or Outlook.

I don’t get it. POP3 is awful and kind of works offline. IMAP is old, clunky, and works fairly well offline. JMAP is supposedly the new hotness, but the paid first party experience will not even try to load offline. This is table stakes! Eudora could do this. Every version of Outlook ever could do this. Thunderbird can, and always could, do this. The usual command-line clients work offline if configured appropriately. Heck, Google went above and beyond and made Gmail’s webmail work quite well offline if you care to set it up, and I think they did a bunch of early work on service workers to make this possible. Fastmail, please stop pitching your fancy protocols until you can get your clients up to the state of the art as of twenty to thirty years ago.

edit: Huh, mobile offline support is in beta as of December 16. No way!

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#69

Post by radicality »

amluto wrote: post #68
gjmveloso wrote: post #5

JMAP is the best email protocol out there that nobody uses (besides Fastmail), sadly. It would be great that the two big email providers (Google and Microsoft) implemented and supported it. It would make so easier and reliable to have a single client that works really well across personal and business email accounts, for example.

I have no idea whether JMAP is any good, but I find all the hype utterly baffling. JMAP is supposedly awesome. There is real thoughtful engineering going into offline support: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-mail-storage/ And yet: at least as of a couple months ago, there isn’t actually any offline support! The Fastmail first party app does not work at all offline . Complete failure. Does not even try. Oh, and…

Similarly, I wish I could find some iOS mail app that allows me to have the have the full mailbox locally. I use Gmail with the Mail app on iOS, and tried multiple mail apps to try to find one that will download the whole mailbox with all attachments and let me search it locally quickly, but seems that doesn’t exist. On Mac I’m using Mailmate and liking it.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#70

Post by joecool1029 »

mort96 wrote: post #7
gjmveloso wrote: post #5

JMAP is the best email protocol out there that nobody uses (besides Fastmail), sadly. It would be great that the two big email providers (Google and Microsoft) implemented and supported it. It would make so easier and reliable to have a single client that works really well across personal and business email accounts, for example.

Sadly, Google and Microsoft are in the business of getting their users to use their own gmail and outlook clients. They don't want to be invisible IMAP/JMAP back-ends, they want to own your e-mail experience .

What about Amazon? They could do it with AWS. It seems odd now to think they haven't offered a service like this yet.
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