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Ten Years of JMAP

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Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#71

Post by solarkraft »

I have considered writing an E-Mail client, so I’ve done a little research on the ecosystem.

JMAP seems like exactly the protocol I’d want to use to avoid much of the IMAP pain, but there’s almost no ecosystem.

If I wrote an E-Mail client for JMAP, I’d basically make it for Fastmail and for Fastmail only - and I couldn’t even do so without paying Fastmail. That’s untenable, I’d be 100x better off targeting the GMail API.

An IMO perfect way to jumpstart adoption would be an IMAP-to-JMAP proxy, which I don’t think currently exists (maybe due to basic deficiencies in IMAP, I’m not sure). It would allow people waiting to develop and use modern clients relatively easily.

Currently the best way to get non first party JMAP infrastructure seems to be to host Stalwart (https://stalw.art/) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#72

Post by BenjiWiebe »

Snacklive wrote: post #57
jeltz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not well. At least Thunderbird with Gmail does not work very well.

What are the problems you have faced ? I'm been using Thunderbird for a few months and i haven't notice anything weird

I've been using Thunderbird with GMail for 10+ years. The main issue was having to switch to oauth login a while back.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#73

Post by mort96 »

dgeiser13 wrote: post #58
mort96 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Gmail supports IMAP.

It does, but IMAP is clearly not a priority, and they certainly aren't interested in JMAP. They support IMAP (with caveats) because you can't really offer e-mail without IMAP, but they want you to use their GMail app.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#74

Post by Mailtemi »

radicality wrote: post #69
amluto wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm actually working on this (https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/). After pushing Mailtemi on Android, I will continue working on full offline support.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#75

Post by antifarben »

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.

StalwartMail supports JMAP out of the box

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#76

Post by retrochameleon »

mort96 wrote: post #73
dgeiser13 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail supports IMAP.

It does, but IMAP is clearly not a priority, and they certainly aren't interested in JMAP. They support IMAP (with caveats) because you can't really offer e-mail without IMAP, but they want you to use their GMail app.

Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure.

But Gmail doesn't have "folders". They have "labels". I wont go into all the details about how Gmail labels work that frustrate and annoy me, but the point is that IMAP clients cannot see labels, they can't replicate it on the client end, etc.

This caused a legitimate problem at work when the finance dept. wants to use this service that reads emails to automatically scan invoices into their system and whatnot. They wanted to be able to only have a subfolder automatically imported into the program, because too many of the emails were not relevant to get imported, creating more work to clear them out.

We were not able to achieve a solution with a simple folder for the users to move emails into to get them imported. Instead, we had to set up a second email account specifically for this importing service, and whenever finance wants something imported, they forward the email to that second account.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#77

Post by MaKey »

retrochameleon wrote: post #76
mort96 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, but IMAP is clearly not a priority, and they certainly aren't interested in JMAP. They support IMAP (with caveats) because you can't really offer e-mail without IMAP, but they want you to use their GMail app.

Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. But Gmail doesn't have "folders". They have "labels". I wont go into all the details about how Gmail labels work that frustrate and annoy me, but the point is that IMAP clients cannot see labels, they can't replicate it on the client end, etc. Th…

> Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure.

I think the "NOT" slipped in there by accident.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#78

Post by amaccuish »

retrochameleon wrote: post #76
mort96 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, but IMAP is clearly not a priority, and they certainly aren't interested in JMAP. They support IMAP (with caveats) because you can't really offer e-mail without IMAP, but they want you to use their GMail app.

Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. But Gmail doesn't have "folders". They have "labels". I wont go into all the details about how Gmail labels work that frustrate and annoy me, but the point is that IMAP clients cannot see labels, they can't replicate it on the client end, etc. Th…

The problem is that in IMAP the concept of labels doesn't exist. Thus they are implemented using folders, which is a concept in IMAP. But that issue is, a message is then in multiple folders (to reflect that it has multiple labels), but in the way this happens in IMAP, they are different messages, even if the content is the same. And thus I can imagine, automated programs, not aware of this, may for example see 2 invoices (because the email has 2 labels) rather than 1.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#79

Post by k_g_b_ »

amaccuish wrote: post #78
retrochameleon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally, email providers let you organize into folders. And IMAP (if I understand correctly) DOES NOT allow clients to see those folders and replicate the folder structure. But Gmail doesn't have "folders". They have "labels". I wont go into all the details about how Gmail labels work that frustrate and annoy me, but the point is that IMAP clients cannot see labels, they can't replicate it on the client end, etc. Th…

The problem is that in IMAP the concept of labels doesn't exist. Thus they are implemented using folders, which is a concept in IMAP. But that issue is, a message is then in multiple folders (to reflect that it has multiple labels), but in the way this happens in IMAP, they are different messages, even if the content is the same. And thus I can imagine, automated programs, not aware of this, may for example see 2 inv…

IMAP has a concept of flags/keywords (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9051 2.3.2) and there's a whole bunch of servers and clients that support using it in a similar way as labels - Thunderbird, Zimbra, dovecot, etc.

It's not a feature originally built for labelling like Gmail, so it has a few complexities ("Servers MAY permit the client to define new keywords") and enough clients (especially mobile) that don't support it - but they could just like Thunderbird or some webmail clients.

I've used it basically exactly like Gmail labels for years on TB on desktop.

Re: Ten Years of JMAP

#80

Post by radicality »

Mailtemi wrote: post #74
radicality wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm actually working on this ( https://mailtemi.com/blog/storage-redesign/ ). After pushing Mailtemi on Android, I will continue working on full offline support.

That’s awesome, will check it out!
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