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I'm not sure if I understand the claimed benefit of jmap being an open standard. Isn't imap already an open standard? If so, if Gmail adopted jmap and added proprietary APIs to it, wouldn't we end up where we are now?

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IMAP is a really difficult and antiquated protocol to work with also. It's responses are in a non-regular grammar (as opposed to JSON), and IMAP server implementations vary wildly.

As a result, properly functioning IMAP clients/libraries are really few and far-between.

The benefits are that (a) JMAP is superior to IMAP in ways that really affect end-users of email clients, and (b) as opposed to other high-performance email protocols, JMAP is an open standard.

> if Gmail adopted jmap and added proprietary APIs to it, wouldn't we end up where we are now?

The promise is that vendors would be able to use JMAP out of the box.

> in ways that really affect end-users of email clients

If you don’t mind enumerating what you have in mind, what specifically?

I worked through a few in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36134733.

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