[javajosh]

Like the idea of normalizing email behind a web API, but don't see how this can survive if there is any credible open-source alternative. I can't imagine that the number of people wanting to write email clients is that large - unless you consider bespoke applications that have some email functionality to be a custom client.

In fact, if I had to guess, I'd bet a late night convo that went: "You know, any sufficiently advanced application gets email," "Then we should build and sell an email backend SaaS!" "Yeah!" And then the splash page went up and you started hacking.

Good luck with this anyway.

[stevekemp]

Yes I wrote something similar, presenting a JSON API on the folders in ~/Maildir for all the local users of a server.

It only does the basic things:

  * Listing folders/Maildirs.
  * Retrieving messages from a named folder.

I didn't have a compelling use for it, but I was curious about whether it would make sense to base my mail-client on an API rather than the filesystem. (In the end my mail-client only reads/writes to ~/Maildir and I avoided the API step in the middle.)