Is JMAP (modern IMAP alternative) a thing?

WildEnte

@gmg said in Support for Modern Authentification:

JMAP

I came across JMAP as a relatively new (~2019?) alternative to IMAP made by Fastmail in my Mastodon Feed (edit: and it seems the trigger is a recent discussion on HackerNews which instantly stopped being about JMAP and became a discussion about Fastmail instead) So I searched the forum and found @gmg mentioning the term in another thread about another topic (linked above)

While there are plenty of feature requests that I like to see implemented well before a protocol that, as far as I can tell, noone seems to use at this point (chicken egg problem?), I'm still interested in opening the discussion about JMAP here.

Is JMAP as a standard a thing? Why, why not?

sgunhouse

Google finds that the J stands for JSON, and brings up this

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/about/

edwardp

@WildEnte @sgunhouse The HackerNews thread mentions 'masked e-mail addresses'. Sounds like a spammers dream.

yojimbo274064400

@edwardp said in Is JMAP (modern IMAP alternative) a thing?:

⋮
… Sounds like a spammers dream.

AFAICS those providers providing the ability to reply / send from a masked email address charge for it, i.e. it is not free, so unlikely to be abused by a spammer — the spammer would also need to overcome the service providers anti-spamming protections.

DoctorG

What is missing in IMAP they want to force it to JSON!? Need of more bugs because of Javascript and JSON APIs? Running servers as a JS App? Ugly ideas. Good Gracious!

epp

@DoctorG I think this is a solution in search of a problem.

stimut

If you want to understand why JMAP was created, have a look at the FAQs near the bottom of the JMAP project homepage. It provides some arguments for why JMAP is arguably better than IMAP, and why JSON was used (JSON doesn't imply Javascript, by the way).

Fastmail also has some blog posts which go into more depth on some of these topics.

sarahj

jmap would be a great option to use. It looks like it would save a lot on battery use on mobile too. I see on f-droid there's a new webmail client app for jmap. Would be good to try with vivaldi mail