Any news about clients and servers?Any efforts to make adoption by email providers? Mailbox format?

[timofonic timofonic]

Hello.

I'm a frustrated user of email, currently using GMail's webmail but want to use a local email client. The issue is that most email clients can't work reliably and in usable ways with my 900K+ email accounts.

Excuse me for being too verbose, unordered mess and probably being wrong in many aspects, including descriptions or suggestions. I just want to open a debate and see the possitilities of the ecosystem behind JMAP, nothing else.

What's the current status about JMAP?

Are there efforts to make clients support it? From my biased POV, I would like to see: Thunderbird ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322991 ), Evolution, KMail, Claws Mail, Zimbra Desktop (webapp), NeoMutt (WIP fork available https://github.com/robn/neomutt/tree/jmap ), Alpine ( http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git ), Geary, Apple Mail, Opera Mail, Balsa, Citadel/UX, Elm ME+ ( http://www.elmme-mailer.org ), GNUMail, Gnus (emacs), IBM Notes, IMP, Inky, Mailpile, Pegasus Mail, SquirrelMail, Sylpheed, K-9 Mail ( see https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code-2017 ), The Bat!, Trojitá, YAM ( https://github.com/jens-maus/yam ), Unibox ( https://www.uniboxapp.com ), Mail Pilot, Airmail ( http://airmailapp.com ), MailMate ( https://freron.com ), Postbox ( https://freron.com ), Polymail, Nylas Mail, Spark, Canary Mail, Mulberry, Mailsmith, Foxmail.

My (possibly wrong) point of view about how to make JMAP more popular and supported:

- Provide not only updated specs (as Vulkan does, for example), but also reference implementations (extremely robust, extremely reusable, extremely portable, extremely up-to-date, extremely resource efficient) for a wide variety of programming languages (such as CommonMark, Rosettacode.org code, Protobuf, https://raft.github.io/#implementations , smaller projects like https://github.com/bengsfort/8-puzzle-solutions https://github.com/biotool-paper/biotool https://github.com/kad-ecoli/pdb2fasta https://github.com/apauley/HollingBerries https://github.com/troeger/corba-example): Maybe you could automatize the task by using something like Quark ( https://github.com/datawire/quark ) but supporting more programming languages (Web Services Description Language? Web Application Description Language? OpenAPI Specification? Open Data Protocol? GData? Resource Description Framework? JSON-LD? JSON-WSP? CWM (Notation3? N-Quads?)? Open Service Interface Definitions? Messaging Open Service Interface Definition? Protocol Buffers? Apache Thrift? RESTful Service Description Language? Web IDL?

** What about Advanced Message Queuing Protocol? Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol? Distributed Data Management Architecture? Distributed Relational Database Architecture? IPFS? Message Queue Telemetry Transport? Constrained Application Protocol? Web Application Messaging Protocol? MessagePack? BSON CBOR? JSONB? Smile? UBJSON? Protocol Buffers? ZeroMQ? Nanomsg? Enduro/X? Gearman?

* Ada: A structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design-by-contract, extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, offering tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international standard; the current version (known as Ada 2012) is defined by ISO/IEC 8652:2012. It's the "military language" because it was designed by contract by the DoD, but it's used in many other safety-critical systems (avionics and air traffic control, commercial rockets such as the Ariane 4 and 5, satellites and other space systems, railway transport and banking). SPARK is based on Ada too.

* Brainf$ck and Malbolge: I'm joking here! But esoteric programming languages would provide fun by many twisted programmers and maybe testing the protocol in weird ways.

* C: A general-purpose, imperative computer programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope and recursion, static type system. Used in embedded devices, operating systems, supercomputers and more.

* C++: A general-purpose programming language. It has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features, with facilities for low-level memory mani. The quite known evolution of C to become an object oriented language. Widely used too, from embedded to supercomputers.

* C♯: Microsoft's competitor to Java. It's a strong typing, multi-paradigm (imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented) programming language. It's widely used in Microsoft software, web, enterprise and others.

* Go: Google's free and open source programming language. It's compiled (and got GCC support), statically typed language with garbage collection, limited structural typing, memory safety features and CSP-style concurrent programming. It's becoming quite popular too (13th at TIOBE).

* Haskell: A standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It's widely used in academia and also used in industry (Facebook uses it).

* Java: A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented programming language. A popular language in enterprise and mobile due to Android. There also embedded versions of it.

** What about RabbitMQ? Google's Guava? Spring AMQ?

* JavaScript: An high-level, dynamic, weakly typed, object-based, multi-paradigm ( event-driven, functional, and imperative (including object-oriented and prototype-based)), and interpreted programming language. The language of web, but now used as a RAD one too.

* Julia: A dynamic, high level programming language. It's  effective for general-purpose programming, web use and specification language. It has a type system with parametric polymorphism and types in a fully dynamic programming language and multiple dispatch as its core programming paradigm. It allows concurrent, parallel and distributed computing, and direct calling of C and Fortran libraries without glue code. It's designed with supercomputing in mind.

* Lua: A lightweight, dynamically typed, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded systems and clients. It's widely used by game programmers as a scripting language.

* Objective-C: Apple's general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. It adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. 

* OCaml: It's multi-paradigm: imperative, functional, object-oriented. It's an evolution of Caml. It features static type system, type inference, parametric polymorphism, tail recursion, pattern matching, first class lexical closures, functors (parametric modules), exception handling, and incremental generational automatic garbage collection.It has a large standard library. Despite it's strong usage in academia, it's also used by many important projects ( Flow, Infer, and Pfff by Facebook. Haxe compiler. Xen Cloud Platform, Citrix Systems' XenServer, Unison).

* Perl: An high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Aren't there one now? :)

* PHP: Used in lots of web apps, many of them being web email clients.

* Python: A widely used (top 5 at TIOBE) high-level, general-purpose, multiparadigm (object-oriented, imperative, functional programming, procedural, structured, aspect-oriented, reflection) programming language. With a very wide variety of libraries and multiplatform. It's used in a broad rane of use cases including embedded and web (Reddit is entirely written in Python, Dropbox uses it, etc).

* Ruby: A dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose, multiple programming paradigms (including functional, object-oriented, and imperative) programming language. There's a web framework for it, called Ruby on Rails.

* Rust: A systems programming language sponsored by Mozilla Research. It's designed to be a safe, concurrent, practical language that supports functional and imperative-procedural paradigms. It's syntactically similar to C++, but designed for better memory safety while maintaining performance. It's used by the Servo project (parts of it are progressively merged to Firefox) and these days it's gaining a lot of market and community acceptance.

* Lisp and dialects: Scheme, Common Lisp.

* Swift: Apple's general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language. It aims to be the sucessor of Objective-C. It's got quite popular (top 10 in TIOBE index).

Also, don't forget:

- Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement.

- Conformance test suite: Strict testing tools to check the implementation conforms the "standard"/expected behavior (I hope it gets accepted by IETF, then ISO).

* There are stuff for this such as ETSI/ITU-T TTCN-3 ( http://www.ttcn-3.org ): Used by SIP, WiMAX, DSRC, Open Mobile Alliance, AUTOSAR, 3GPP...) by test cases, interoperability testing and more.

Are there email service providers interested in JMAP in both the evolution and implementation of it in their services other than Fastmail itself? What about Google, Yahoo and others?

What about the Mailbox format? Maildir is (not so) okay, but don't offers indexing. Other formats put all the messages in one large file, that seems hacky as hell. What about MIX ( http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git/blob/HEAD:/imap/docs/mixfmt.txt http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git/blob/HEAD:/imap/src/osdep/unix/mix.c http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git/blob/HEAD:/imap/src/osdep/amiga/mix.c http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/mixfmt.txt.html https://www.mail-archive.com/ima...@u.washington.edu/msg01802.html )? MIX is indexed and offers many features? It seems Dovecot's multi-dbox seem to offer somewhat similar, but I'm not sure. I firmly believe there's need for a new standarized Mailbox format designed to be highly scalable, from small devices to big datacenters.

Interesting conversation about GMail API and IMAP, despite it's many years old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945798

Another one: Thunderbird's Future Home https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14299022

Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb-planning/SPs8gzO5Wy0%5B1-25%5D Interesting part -> "Email is rife with buggy implementations and has no general conformance testsuite, so you're not going to find problems until you get actual users with their weird edge cases"

Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251

More about Thunderbird here, with many interesting discussions: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tb-planning

Kind regards.

[Bron Gondwana]

Hi timofonic,

Thanks for your interest in JMAP.  A lot of the discussion is now happening on the IETF working group.

I find it hard to make a specific reply to your suggestions below because it is, as you noted, very verbose!  It's pretty much a list of email clients and technologies in no particular order.  I think a good first approach is to work closely with a couple of high quality implementations of both clients and servers and make sure we have a solid set of tests that ensure protocol compliance.

I expect JMAP to be a lot closer to its final shape after IETF100 in November.  We should have a very complete implementation in Cyrus IMAPd by about then, as well a production-grade service running pure JMAP at FastMail.  It's hard to encourage others to use JMAP "for real" while the protocol itself is in flux - it's still very much at the experimental stage as a standard.

Regards,

Bron.

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[timofonic timofonic]

It's okay. I'm sorry.

What about a modern, used by lots of software, standarized, highly scalable and usable from low-end to high-end systems Mailbox format for this new JMAP protocol? Most Email server and clients use incompatible formats or own additions.

Here's an incomplete example: https://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat

Some mentions from a software: http://www.aid4mail.com/supported-email-formats

m

[Neil Jenkins]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2017, at 04:08 AM, timofonic timofonic wrote:

What about a modern, used by lots of software, standarized, highly scalable and usable from low-end to high-end systems Mailbox format for this new JMAP protocol?

This is outside the direct scope of the JMAP project. JMAP is a protocol you can use to synchronise data between a server and a client. How the client/server chooses to store and index the data is independent of this.

Neil.