JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

Anyone got a link to a better sales job on JMAP & friends?

It sounds awesome but the way it is intro'd here:

  Over the past few years, the IETF has been redefining how email, calendars, and contacts are synchronized and shared. Building upon the success of JMAP for Mail, several new protocol extensions have been introduced:

  JMAP for Calendars - A modern replacement for CalDAV and CalDAV Scheduling.
  JMAP for Contacts – A powerful alternative to CardDAV.
  JMAP for File Storage – A replacement for WebDAV-based file storage.
  JMAP Sharing – A modern successor to WebDAV ACL.
  JSCalendar - A clean, JSON-based evolution of iCalendar.
  JSContact – A modernized, JSON-native successor to vCard.

...gave me pause. A protocol I've never heard even though I hang out here for an hour a day, was so successful, that it launched 6 new projects?

Sounds more like the parts of the web dev that give me ick (new and shiny; rush to copy new and shiny in other contexts; give it a year; and all of a sudden only 1 of the 6 actually was successful)

JMAP and friends are very niche, none of the "mainstream" email clients (that ship with most computers/phones) support it. So this feature being available is unlikely to grow the userbase, IMO.

Now JMAP is quite a bit nicer to use than IMAP's API, but IMAP's gravitational field is too strong to be supplanted. IMAP is also becoming somewhat of a niche protocol, as the majority of users use vendor proprietary protocols for accessing their emails on Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, etc. So why invest the time to add a niche replacement for IMAP when the entire protocol is a second class citizen to mainstream email clients.

You may only just have heard of them, but the WG goes back to 2017.

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

Bron is the principal of fastmail, who now own pobox. This is a serious activity.

Counterpoint: I Google'd "jmap gmail" and a top result is a comment from HN in 2019 saying Gmail will never implement JMAP (it has not)

That's a really cruel response, because this is important work. I don't want my kids beholden to bigco.

I think it's real & important.

I also wanna make sure people like me, who have to keep tabs on the intersection of "how can I help liberate from BigCo" and "how can I make a livable wage doing so"

It is, quite literally, real, but also something you shouldn't waste time on if you're already busy. (c.f. https://jmap.io/software.html)

Agreed, also not clear what this or why it matters. This is a new self-hostable email server basically?

The big pitch for JMAP is for a modern web-tech-only approach to email/calendar/"groupware" servers. One reason to do that would be to make it easier to also build email/calendar/"groupware" clients entirely out of modern web-tech. Today most "web email clients" are bespoke to specific stacks/email servers. A dream of JMAP is that with the right CORS policy a single web client could interact with multiple JMAP servers, using only fetch/XHR.

The modernization efforts of JMAP are interesting, too. Most of the old protocols are a mess of bespoke plaintext formats full of quirks evolved over decades in a giant mess of different software. Even the stuff that was already web tech like WebDAV and its extensions CalDAV and CardDAV were full of quirks, violated some REST "rules", and originally intended for a different purpose (file shares/FTP replacement). JMAP is much closer to "plain REST" than WebDAV's complex HTTP protocol extensions/changes.

If you look it up, you'll see that JMAP is 6 years old now. It's a protocol for doing email (and now other things) over HTTP, without many of the legacy issues from IMAP and SMTP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol / https://jmap.io/index.html