JMAP: It’s Like IMAP but Not Really (2019)
JMAP sounded promising several years ago, and it was great to hear it published as a standard. But it seems like it’ll just remain as what Fastmail (the email provider) uses. Maybe the JMAP team is very small and can’t get more people. Maybe Fastmail doesn’t have enough money and/or enough interest to make it easier to use and to evangelize it with major email providers and email client developers.I don’t see Outlook365 or Gmail (or even Apple for its iCloud email that has a relatively smaller user base) announcing any implementations of JMAP on their services. I don’t see smaller paid email service providers announce support for it. As it stands now, I don’t see a future for JMAP outside of Fastmail.A popular client like Mozilla Thunderbird still hasn’t started implementing JMAP [1] and one of the reasons is because…the client and server documentation for JMAP haven’t been updated for a few years. [2]So yeah, JMAP is like IMAP, but not really. We probably need a successor to JMAP that is liked enough to be implemented by email service providers and by email clients.[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322991[2]: https://github.com/jmapio/jmap/issues/323