A mail server that supports JMAP (JSON Mail Access Protocol), to replace IMAP, SMTP, CardDAV and CalDAV)

Blue Skies
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JSON is an IETF standard:

Virtualmin uses Dovecot, where a core member indicated “We have no plans to actually start working on JMAP itself, but nothing prevents outside contributions. It would likely be in a separate git repository anyway.” Source: https://dovecot.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/dovecot@dovecot.org/message/4FIXWCJGDHSGXXJZQ76B5K4HW7RHCRYQ/

See previous discussions about JMAP:
https://dovecot.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/search?q=jmap&page=1&sort=date-desc

So supporting JMAP would require to use one of the other options.
https://jmap.io/software.html

Here you can compare the 3 projects. Interestingly, one is 2 years old, one is 17 years old and the other is 31 years old!
https://openhub.net/p/_compare?project_0=Apache+JAMES+Project&project_1=Cyrus+IMAP&project_2=Stalwart+Mail+Server

I know the mail stack in Virtualmin is complex. But this is the “Blue Skies” section :smiley:

Thank you!

Marc

1 Like
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I’ve tinkered a bit with Stalwart, and Cyrus is, of course, a known entity. I’d be hesitant to introduce a big Java thing to the stack.

JMAP is still a draft, AFAIK. I’ve been on the mailing list for like a decade, and I don’t think I’ve seen it being accepted as a standard. That doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t useful or reasonable to deploy (but, it’s still a question whether it is useful yet, as there isn’t great client support…no point in having a JMAP server if nobody connects to it).

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And, worth thinking about whether JMAP actually provides anything valuable for non-web based clients. For web-based clients it makes a lot of sense, because the client can query the JMAP server directly (should such clients exist, but they currently don’t really, AFAIK the webmail clients that I’m aware of don’t have production-ready JMAP support, and Usermin certainly doesn’t), but for something like Thunderbird, IMAP is already quite efficient…JMAP probably can’t beat it, it just changes the format of the communication back and forth. Newer isn’t necessarily better in this case.

So, I like the idea of JMAP for webmail clients, but none of the webmail clients I pay attention to has support for JMAP.