JMAP Support (or similar) for Thunderbird

[hutcheon]

IMAP is awesome, but has some rough edges around things like IDLE being only able to monitor one folder per connection.  This means users may get an inconsistent experience depending on the number of folders they have, with emails arriving in some showing up immediately, while others have to wait until the regular "check for new messages" check. 

JMAP (for example) removes these problems, and for mobile applications, provide a better experience.

https://jmap.io/spec.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[dcrocker]

Cleaner, simpler.  Maybe faster.  Yes, please.

[rpedrica]

This looks like a good option however there is little mainstream server-side support for this protocol which means there is not much for TBird to work with. Chicken and egg ... And although Cyrus is one of my favourite mail servers, it's not really mainstream. Let's see if there is movement on the  server side of the next couple of years.

[larstobi]

In fact, there is also a 7 year old bugzilla bug for this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322991

[larstobi]

Fastmail (https://fastmail.com) is a commercial email provider and supports JMAP.

[aspensmonster]

IIRC, Fastmail has been heavily involved in getting JMAP standardized:

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/jmap-new-email-open-standard/

[jnv]

There's a new mail server with native support for JMAP: https://stalw.art/

There's also JMAP proxy which provides interface on top of IMAP and SMTP servers, but it seems mostly abandoned: https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl

[blastrock]

I would love to see this in Thunderbird and I'd happily put a bounty on it, but it doesn't look like such a thing exists. I found https://app.bountysource.com/teams/thunderbird/issues but all issues are at least 10 years old, so I don't think it's relevant anymore. Anyway, I'll donate 50€ should this be implemented! (btw, please make a bounty system)

[MattAuSupport]

Not a server software issue,  but what mainstream mail provider is providing JMAP at this time?

[sunbeam60]

@MattAuSupportthis is definitely a chicken-and-egg situation, though. Without client support, why would more mail providers support it? What is Mozilla's purpose if not to move the world towards open standards?

[pcfreak30]

As a FOSS dev that is innovating on web tech and end user, as well as a donator, I support this as well.

We really need to push to get modern mail systems.

[snowflake2712]

I'd like this too!

[Chri5]

I'd like to see JMAP supported by Thunderbird, since it's supposed to be faster & more responsive - and would surely be a better way of using say Fastmail.

[quickfixdemon]

I agree, we really need Thunderbird to support JMAP. If mainstream email clients start to support JMAP, then server software will follow. At the moment, Apache James, Stalwart, Cyrus and a few other server softwares support JMAP; however, others like dovecot are still yet to add support. Mozilla, please implement this. We really need open email standards like this, so proprietary protocols like MAPI don't take over the internet.

[eternaltyro]

I endorse this proposal. JMAP used to be on the Thunderbird roadmap on the developer portal, but it has been removed since - presumably because other priorities took over. I think this is an important standard to support and should be added to the medium term roadmap. Please also add it to the standards page on the dev portal - https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/standards-status indicating status.