JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#1

Post by jbuild » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#2

Post by nwah1 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

Brilliant stuff, but kind of sad that this hasn't caught on already. I realize that standardization has only firmed up recently, but other standards like HTTP and TLS see preview releases supported in major products well before they are finalized.

Who uses JMAP besides FastMail?

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#3

Post by atonse » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #2

Brilliant stuff, but kind of sad that this hasn't caught on already. I realize that standardization has only firmed up recently, but other standards like HTTP and TLS see preview releases supported in major products well before they are finalized. Who uses JMAP besides FastMail?

Isn't email mostly consolidated to a handful of providers with published APIs? (Office365, Google, Yahoo) I'd be curious to see the market share of just those 3 combined.

And they don't have any incentive to move to this.

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#4

Post by Octoth0rpe » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #3

nwah1 wrote: post #2

Brilliant stuff, but kind of sad that this hasn't caught on already. I realize that standardization has only firmed up recently, but other standards like HTTP and TLS see preview releases supported in major products well before they are finalized. Who uses JMAP besides FastMail?

Isn't email mostly consolidated to a handful of providers with published APIs? (Office365, Google, Yahoo) I'd be curious to see the market share of just those 3 combined. And they don't have any incentive to move to this.

Imagine if some company offered a $5/month service that connects to o365/gmail/yahoo via imap, and then presents your email via jmap. After a few years of that company making money, I could see at least one of the big 3 offering a $1/month option to cut out the middleman. And if more of them start offering the same, then it's only a matter of time before one of them offers up jmap for free.

Unlikely, but seems plausible to me.

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#5

Post by chrysoprace » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

> JMAP is therefore not introducing any new measures to address end-to-end encryption.

It seems like a wasted opportunity to not make E2EE a primary focus of a new email standard. Hopefully there will be standard extensions down the road to add this if JMAP takes off.

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#6

Post by School-Cotton » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #3

nwah1 wrote: post #2

Brilliant stuff, but kind of sad that this hasn't caught on already. I realize that standardization has only firmed up recently, but other standards like HTTP and TLS see preview releases supported in major products well before they are finalized. Who uses JMAP besides FastMail?

Isn't email mostly consolidated to a handful of providers with published APIs? (Office365, Google, Yahoo) I'd be curious to see the market share of just those 3 combined. And they don't have any incentive to move to this.

> Isn't email mostly consolidated to a handful of providers with published APIs?

Perhaps for individuals and small businesses, but certainly not for large organizations, many of whom are running their own Exchange (or whatever else) servers.

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#7

Post by seminatl » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

How do various mail clients talk to their respective backends? I.e. what does iOS Mail use to talk to iCloud? The GMail iOS app speaks a bespoke binary protocol to Google's servers, not IMAP.

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#8

Post by ape4 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

Its JSON via REST - so totally different than IMAP. Which may be good.

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#9

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #4

atonse wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't email mostly consolidated to a handful of providers with published APIs? (Office365, Google, Yahoo) I'd be curious to see the market share of just those 3 combined. And they don't have any incentive to move to this.

Imagine if some company offered a $5/month service that connects to o365/gmail/yahoo via imap, and then presents your email via jmap. After a few years of that company making money, I could see at least one of the big 3 offering a $1/month option to cut out the middleman. And if more of them start offering the same, then it's only a matter of time before one of them offers up jmap for free. Unlikely, but seems plausi…

[deleted]

Re: JMAP: Modern Mail Standard

#10

Post by farisjarrah » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

chrysoprace wrote: post #5

> JMAP is therefore not introducing any new measures to address end-to-end encryption. It seems like a wasted opportunity to not make E2EE a primary focus of a new email standard. Hopefully there will be standard extensions down the road to add this if JMAP takes off.

I've been reading about this, and there seems to be a lot of debate still on implementing E2EE via the email providers. From what I have gathered most email providers use TLS and encrypt data on disk at rest, but they feel like its pointless to implement E2EE, because by default as 99% of incoming emails are all unencrypted, and 99% of emails need to leave your email unencrypted(otherwise the receiving email party would be unable to read the encrypted message)