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by frumplestlatz 246 days ago
There isn’t really a great motivating feature or use-case driving client or server adoption.

To be honest, I’m not sure why end-users would want JMAP for e-mail access.

It would be interesting if they do successfully roll out all of these additional RFC proposals providing a cohesive “groupware” protocol covering calendering, contacts, file shares, etc, we see notable server implementations, and interest is enough to drive client support.

That’s a lot of “ifs”.
1 comments
tjoff 246 days ago
Because IMAP is horrible, it is another driving reason why we are moving towards the dystopian world of webmail.
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frumplestlatz 246 days ago
Horrible how, exactly?

People say things like that, and I wonder if I’ve just been living in a gilded tower of using Apple Mail with decent IMAP server implementations.

I’m also pretty familiar with the wire protocol and its implementation — it’s never struck me as particularly horrible.

A new protocol isn’t likely to solve the problem of poorly implemented clients and servers — e.g. Google doesn’t really care about good IMAP support, so they’re unlikely to care much about JMAP, either. They just want you to use their webapp.

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isaachinman 246 days ago
Gilded tower? Are we living in separate universes?

Shameless plug for a client with true offline-first IMAP support:

https://marcoapp.io

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frumplestlatz 246 days ago
Sounds like it :) I’ve been very happy with Mail.app since MacOS 10.0. My use has always been with my employer’s IMAP servers, and my own cryus (and eventually) dovecot self-hosted IMAP servers.

Mail.app is what NeXT used internally, and Apple uses to this day AFAIK. Steve Jobs historically paid a lot of attention to it and wasn’t shy about weighing in on any changes.

Most of the complaints that I’ve heard about it seemed to stem from poor IMAP servers (e.g. Gmail), but it sounds like your knowledge in the space would be a lot more detailed and recent than mine, so I would be very interested in your thoughts.

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isaachinman 245 days ago
Well Jobs is long gone. Apple Mail seems like it hasn't been touched much since his days.

I've written about my experience and motivations here:

https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction

Gmail does indeed _intentionally_ provide poor IMAP service. But the long and short of it is that Apple Mail simply isn't a first-class product. It's an afterthought.

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