I have considered writing an E-Mail client, so I’ve done a little research on the ecosystem.
JMAP seems like exactly the protocol I’d want to use to avoid much of the IMAP pain, but there’s almost no ecosystem.
If I wrote an E-Mail client for JMAP, I’d basically make it for Fastmail and for Fastmail only - and I couldn’t even do so without paying Fastmail. That’s untenable, I’d be 100x better off targeting the GMail API.
An IMO perfect way to jumpstart adoption would be an IMAP-to-JMAP proxy, which I don’t think currently exists (maybe due to basic deficiencies in IMAP, I’m not sure). It would allow people waiting to develop and use modern clients relatively easily.
Currently the best way to get non first party JMAP infrastructure seems to be to host Stalwart (https://stalw.art/) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.
JMAP seems like exactly the protocol I’d want to use to avoid much of the IMAP pain, but there’s almost no ecosystem.
If I wrote an E-Mail client for JMAP, I’d basically make it for Fastmail and for Fastmail only - and I couldn’t even do so without paying Fastmail. That’s untenable, I’d be 100x better off targeting the GMail API.
An IMO perfect way to jumpstart adoption would be an IMAP-to-JMAP proxy, which I don’t think currently exists (maybe due to basic deficiencies in IMAP, I’m not sure). It would allow people waiting to develop and use modern clients relatively easily.
Currently the best way to get non first party JMAP infrastructure seems to be to host Stalwart (https://stalw.art/) and do some trickery to forward your E-Mails there, which hasn’t been worth the effort to me so far.