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Comment by aquabeagle | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail should throw some engineering resources towards implementing JMAP support in some mail clients like Mutt.

The fastest route to MUA support is compatibility with existing MDAs like procmail, maildrop, and the like. At the very least a JMAP client that populates a local Maildir would get you Thunderbird, Evolution, mutt, and more.

Could a fuse filesystem do the trick for maildir emulation? Assuming that'd be beneficial to a full maildir, but I guess it'd only be so at large sizes.

Couldn't à hypothetical fuse fs emulate any file based store for email?

The strong suit of JMAP (among other things) is getting access to specific properties of a server side parsed email. It will do the MIME parsing for you; separate attachments and text bodies from each other and for example allows a client to fetch only Subject and senders instead of the entire email. By brainlessly dumping all that into a Maildir you'd be giving up a lot of the benefits of JMAP. I'm a big fan of JMAP but I don’t see it replacing IMAP for (desktop) clients that will keep a fully synced Maildir locally.

Nobody said anything about doing brainless things. There's a lot of sound and fury from Fastmail about JMAP, but the only client is ... Fastmail's web interface.

I don't care what JMAP wants to do for me as long as it's not actually available to me. IMAP supports downloading headers too -- that doesn't mean everyone uses IMAP 24/7. The IMAP + local synced maildir use case is extremely common and there's no reason JMAP can't do it better.

I merely suggest that starting by making small shims for interoperability would encourage protocol adoption so that when clients arise they'll be in a position to be successful out of the gate.

Maybe, but mutt seems like a poor choice?

They are providing an open source server implementation, which is a great way to increase adoption. Adding support to widely used open source mail clients is also a great option, but I doubt usage of mutt is anywhere near high enough to provide a good return on investment.

Implementing in the default mail client on Ubuntu might be worth it, or maybe the most popular open source web mail client that exists could be worth it. Ideally though they need adoption in something like Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail/iCloud, etc, but these are all closed source so a) impossible to do without support from the vendor, and b) of limited use to increasing the community of JMAP implementors.

That's what the ircv3 guys did. I think it's a cancerous attitude: you get your protocol implemented regardless of whether it's good or not, since most managers of open source software can't say no to free code

I don’t think anyone in the IRCv3 team has provided free code to any other project just for implementing IRCv3 functionality. In fact, the opposite is true, most projects have to spend significant effort to support it — but believe that it is worth it.

That seems like a pretty entitled attitude.

If they want it to be taken seriously by the open source community, might as well start with mail clients used by the top contributors to things like the Linux kernel and core open source libraries used in most Linux distros. This is how to help ensure adoption and making it a replacement for IMAP.

"Ensure adoption" sounds so strong. I won't say I don't know mutt, but it just doesn't strike me as their best bang for buck, in terms of user base, does it? Would it not make more sense for them to invest in, dunno, say, Thunderbird?

I think the point OP was trying to make was that they should invest in MUA support for this feature.. mutt was merely an example.

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