JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

Stalwart is, from what I’ve read, an excellent JMAP server.

JMAP is, from what I’ve read, a great protocol for building an E-Mail (and now also others) client on top of.

Since I would like an innovative way to access my E-Mails, but do not want to self-host, I would find it interesting to use Stalwart as the server component of an E-Mail client: Data is somehow synced into Stalwart via the “ugly” protocols and I get a nice API to build an elegant client on top of.

My basic research shows that something like IMAP-IMAP sync seems to be a thing. Has anyone done something like this, perhaps even with Stalwart? (this of course grows in complexity for each new protocol to be proxied).

I believe having this kind of setup easily accessible could jumpstart a new generation of E-Mail clients on top of JMAP because it (relatively elegantly?) circumvents the chicken-egg problem by allowing all existing IMAP mailboxes to be accessed via JMAP.

I have been looking for something like this for ages. Everything I found so far is overpriced, so this is great development.

i have also been pondering this for the exact same reason... unfortunately, i don't have much to show for said pondering... yet...

This should be pretty straightforward to do with an IMAP <-> IMAP syncing tool, like mbsync [1]. You'd run it periodically in the background to sync the remote IMAP to Stalwart's local IMAP server, and Stalwart can then automatically serve that via JMAP, doing the translation internally.

I was originally thinking you'd need to go remote IMAP <-> maildir <-> Stalwart IMAP, which would be really complicated, but I think the IMAP <-> IMAP should work fine.

[1] https://isync.sourceforge.io/mbsync.html

I would just like to highlight the "excellent" bit here. It is a tour de force, a masterpiece. Beautifully factored software. They've done an excellent job incrementally building trust and delivering. Really cool project, and I'm so glad it exists.

I also did not realize it is… primarily developed by a single person? The author. Incredible:

https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart/graphs/contributors