
JMAP: Modern Mail Standard - jbuild
https://jmap.io
======
dang
Three months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720630)

Four months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20477212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20477212)

Six months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104)

Ten months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996200)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766709)

Also, 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14283659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14283659)

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8785894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8785894)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141152)

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nwah1
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?

~~~
atonse
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.

~~~
Octoth0rpe
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.

~~~
tjwds
That sounds a lot like Fastmail to me!

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joveian
IMO, as a user the biggest advantage is mail being sent via the same protocol
as it is received. Someone made an IMAP extension to do that but unfortunately
it was never widely implemented.

Some aspects of JMAP haven't made it through the standards process yet, like
calendars, quotas, and server-side S/MIME signature verification. Hopefully it
will get wider implementation from the big email companies once those are
complete.

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chrysoprace
> 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.

~~~
farisjarrah
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)

~~~
zaksoup
On the page they also bring up a great point: a bunch of optimizations allowed
by JMAP (including storing attachments as blobs and separating their payloads
from other content) wouldn't be possible if the individual messages were E2E
encrypted.

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seminatl
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.

~~~
angott
iCloud mail in iOS uses plain IMAP. The synchronization stack for iCloud is
surprisingly based on open standards: IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV.

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ape4
Its JSON via REST - so totally different than IMAP. Which may be good.

