JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

I really hope Fastmail implements the JMAP spec for calendars and contacts soon. They’ve had the mail part of the spec implemented for a while, but it still requires CardDAV/CalDAV for contacts and calendar access.

What good is a protocol like JMAP as long as common clients like Thunderbird, K-9 Mail, the iPhone email client and others don't support it? Without some concerted effort it will never take off. Then there is the question of what problem it solves that isn't already solved by existing solutions.

I think Thunderbird will implement JMAP at some point, because as I understand it their upcoming hosted mail service, Thunderbird Pro will offer it.

I looked into adding JMAP support to Thunderbird but the client is so tied around the ideas and principles of IMAP, it needs surgical refactoring of many parts of it and I don’t love C++.

So instead in my spare time I am developing a JMAP only gnome email client, using many Stalwart libraries. Think Geary but Rust instead of Vala, GTK4 instead of GTK3 and JMAP instead of IMAP. It’s been mostly an excuse to play with Rust and gtk-rs and Relm4 (beautiful Elm inspired rust bindings for GTK4). Someday, it will be released.

Client support for a new protocol is never that quick, but I believe adoption will happen, at least outside of the big providers, who will never support it.