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Comment by andrewshadura | Hacker News Reader

I wish JMAP was more widely supported on the client side. None of the clients I use support it, sadly.

On the flip side, I would like to see a free of cost email provider offer JMAP as well. It could be a limited version in the sense that something like the free version only has limited storage or something but it offers the full JMAP experience ^TM or at least that's my expectation to use JMAP.

How come there are no free of cost email providers that support JMAP?

You can use https://stalw.art. Compared to other email stacks, it is very easy to set up. Its support is on par with Fastmail. I develop a JMAP email app (https://mailtemi.com) and have run equal tests against stalw.art locally as well as Fastmail.

But there’s no calendar or contacts support with stalwart right?

Neither Fastmail's JMAP for third-party apps nor Stalw.art supports Contacts/Calendars yet. Fastmail said that it will be enabled once it passes IETF standardization. Stalw.art also mentioned they will add support after the standard is finalized.

That’ll be the case in ten years as well.

I know a couple of people who run large email stacks (500k+ users) and this isn’t on their radar and there is no interest in it. There is a little disdain as they are comp sci people and don’t like JSON at all (I share that concern).

Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of JSON either but given the clusterfuck of established email technologies, moaning about JSON is a little hypocritical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_b...

It's more: we have two clusterfucks now thus might as well use the one we know best.

At least no one tried to use YAML on the wire, so far anyway.

And that one is JMAP. IMAP is such a huge clusterfuck it is almost impossible to beat it.

IMAP is simple and elegant and not a "clusterfuck" at all.

(Source: implemented both serverside and clientside IMAP.)

IMAP is basically a database query language and as such it works as it should.

IMAP is both excellent and, annoyingly inconsistent so it's much more of a pain to develop reliable parsers for. I'm pretty happy to use IMAP generally, but I'm also... MODSEQ is wrapped with a () in some places, not but STATUS HIGHESTMODSEQ:

  . SELECT INBOX.Archive
  * 1239 EXISTS
  * 0 RECENT
  * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe)
  * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $X-ME-Annot-2 $HasAttachment $IsNotification $IsMailingList $NotJunk $CanUnsubscribe \*)] Ok
  * OK [UNSEEN 1221] Ok
  * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1108730350] Ok
  * OK [UIDNEXT 2231] Ok
  * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] Ok
  * OK [MAILBOXID (210306ee-5833-456b-bede-6d04757128b3)] Ok
  * OK [URLMECH INTERNAL] Ok
  * OK [ANNOTATIONS 65536] Ok
  . OK [READ-WRITE] Completed
  . FETCH 1 MODSEQ
  * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 40306873] CONDSTORE enabled by FETCH MODSEQ
  * 1 FETCH (MODSEQ (39570709))
  . OK Completed (0.000 sec)

And... the * operator ranges.

  . FETCH 2231:* (UID MODSEQ)
  * 1239 FETCH (UID 2230 MODSEQ (40306872))
  . OK Completed (0.001 sec)

Source: have also implemented both client and server side IMAP, and reviewed RFC9051 very closely.

So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there? I have tried a lot of clients and nobody has managed an implementstion which is works well in practice.

And it is a pretty bad query language compared to something like SQL.

> So it is just coincidence that there are zero good IMAP clients out there?

Yes. Regardless of the email protocol, third-party clients will always be horrible as long as corporations view email as their enterprise moat.

Email is probably the most conservative, reluctant to change set of protocols there is.

And it'd better stay that way, as it's also the most widely used set of standards for communication across borders, that people rely on about as much if not more than traditional telcos now.

(You should know why the common-sense comments are downvoted --- this is basically an advertisement article, and they don't like it when their $shiny_new_thing is actually shown to be worse than the existing solutions. A huge clue is when the adjective "modern" is thrown around like it's a good thing.)

Nailed it.

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