Stalwart is, from what I’ve read, an excellent JMAP server.
JMAP is, from what I’ve read, a great protocol for building an E-Mail (and now also others) client on top of.
Since I would like an innovative way to access my E-Mails, but do not want to self-host, I would find it interesting to use Stalwart as the server component of an E-Mail client: Data is somehow synced into Stalwart via the “ugly” protocols and I get a nice API to build an elegant client on top of.
My basic research shows that something like IMAP-IMAP sync seems to be a thing. Has anyone done something like this, perhaps even with Stalwart? (this of course grows in complexity for each new protocol to be proxied).
I believe having this kind of setup easily accessible could jumpstart a new generation of E-Mail clients on top of JMAP because it (relatively elegantly?) circumvents the chicken-egg problem by allowing all existing IMAP mailboxes to be accessed via JMAP.
I really hope Fastmail implements the JMAP spec for calendars and contacts soon. They’ve had the mail part of the spec implemented for a while, but it still requires CardDAV/CalDAV for contacts and calendar access.
What good is a protocol like JMAP as long as common clients like Thunderbird, K-9 Mail, the iPhone email client and others don't support it? Without some concerted effort it will never take off. Then there is the question of what problem it solves that isn't already solved by existing solutions.
While JMAP seems to scratch every itch of a sucker for proper web API design, I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP. Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days?
Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO. Then again, a lot of solid thinking went into these things, so there probably are a lot of good reasons that I’m not aware of.
Email was never a binary protocol. Notoriously so, it's why MIME types and MIME encodings get so complicated.
Most of the "old internet" protocols (email, FTP, even HTTP itself) were bootstrapped on top of built-mostly-for-plaintext Telnet. HTTP as the new telnet has a bunch of improvements when it comes to binary data, request/response-based data flows, and some other considerations. HTTP/3 is even inherently a binary protocol, it's lack of "telnet-compatibility" one of the concerns about switching the majority of the web to it.
vCard/vCal/iCard/iCal were also deeply "plaintext formats". JSON is an improvement because it is more structured, even more efficient, than those predecessors. JSON may not look efficient, but it compresses extremely well and can be quite efficient in gzip and Brotli streams.
I feel like "JSON over HTTP" is a subtle improvement over "custom text formats over telnet", even if it doesn't sound like "binary protocol efficiency" at first glance. Especially as HTTP/3 pushes HTTP more efficient and more "binary", and arguably "more fundamental/basic" with HTTP/3 even taking over more roles in the TCP/UDP layer of the internet stack. (Telnet would never try to replace TCP.) HTTP isn't the worst bootstrap layer the internet could use to build new protocols and apps on top of. Sure, it would be neat to see more variety and experiments outside of the HTTP stack, too, but HTTP is too useful at this point not to build a bunch of things on top of it instead of as their own from-scratch protocol.
A lot of the textual nature of older IETF protocols, including the CR LF line endigns, can be probably traced to how easy it was to bang out a bad implementation full of subtle problems that could be debugged by sitting an undergrad student at a teletype instead of spending time on having some binary serializer (that telecom companies definitely had money for)
A lot of old RFCs explicitly mention running on top of TELNET.
Additionally, as much people like to harp about "telcos focusing on connection-oriented protocols while we ran loops around them with packets", the reality is that NCP and later TCP pretty much focused on emulating serial lines around, and one of the earliest ways to access ARPAnet outside of machines directly on it was through calling into a TIP which set up bidirectional stream from your modem to a port on some host.
It's also a reflection of the state-of-the-art at the time. Binary protocols were an unmitigated disaster, with standards bodies thinking that applying to the ISO for your organizational ID is a perfectly fine step that anyone does anyway.
That's why there was an entire section for unassigned numbers.
Binary protocols just meant you actually needed to implement serialiser/deserialiser and similar tooling instead of writing dumbest possible riff on strtok() and hoping your software won't be used anymore once DoD internet becomes mature
It’s not that I cannot appreciate the improvements in the space, I’m just wondering if there might be a big part of the design space for widely used protocols that ends up unexplored because the default for almost anything now is HTTP. It has basically become OSI layer 8 at this point.
MIME/Content-Negotiation is essentially OSI Presentation Layer
HTTP sorta acts as stump of ROSE with bit of ACSE. In addition it provides a bit of basic layer for passing some extra attributes that might be considered in-band or out (or side?) band to the actual exchange.
> Notoriously so, it's why MIME types and MIME encodings get so complicated.
I made up ULFI because I thought MIME has some problems.
> JSON may not look efficient
Efficiency is not the only issue; there is also the consideration of e.g. what data types you want to use. JSON does not have a proper integer type, does not have a proper binary data type (you must encode it as hex or base64 instead), and is limited about what character sets can be used.
(Also, like other text formats, escaping will be needed.)
> I feel like "JSON over HTTP" is a subtle improvement over "custom text formats over telnet"
I think it can be, depending on the specific use; sometimes it isn't, and will make it worse. (HTTP does have the advantage of having URLs and virtual hosting, although I think it adds too much complexity more than should be needed.) However, I still think that DER is generally better than JSON.
> HTTP isn't the worst bootstrap layer the internet could use to build new protocols and apps on top of.
I think it depends on the specific application. However, even then, I think there are better ways than using HTTP with the complexity that it involves, most of which should not be necessary (even though a few parts are helpful, such as virtual hosting).
What are the drawbacks to using the JavaScript Number (really a double float I think) datatype as an integer in an object representation language such as JSON? I've never seen a use case where e.g. 42 (int) could be confused with 42.0 (float). If your application needs specifically an int or a float, then the ingesting application knows that.
If the answer is monetary values, then those should never be floats, and should not be represented in JSON as such. E.g. a dollar and a half should be represented as 150 cents. This follows even for sub-cent precision.
I don't mean 32-bit integers, but rather, 64-bit (and sometimes bigger) integers. JSON already works OK for 32-bit integers (although it is not ideal).
Another point is that the use of HTTP for everything, outside of the issue of middle boxes breaking protocols for everyone, is that it's essentially capitulation to the wisdom of OSI multi-layered protocols - we replicate their feature sets by reusing bits and pieces of HTTP spec all the time.
> Most of the "old internet" protocols (email, FTP, even HTTP itself) were bootstrapped on top of built-mostly-for-plaintext Telnet.
That's just not true. Telnet and SMTP are built on top of TCP. They live on the same layer. They were originally both protocols that transmitted data with printable ascii, hence why they look similar. There are many other protocols like Telnet and SMTP that worked like that, auch as nntp, irc, and yes, even http.
I think that the point is this: You could literally use a telnet client to talk to all of those servers and it was considered a good thing, maybe even an essential feature. So protocol design was somehow influenced by the need to be fully plain text ASCII streams (and maybe that other options weren't adequately explored due to this restriction)
> I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP
It shouldn't. For some cases it helps, but other times it doesn't. Sometimes it helps but there would be better ways to do it, making it on a simpler protocol or making an entirely new protocol (which might or might not use TCP; sometimes it is better to use TCP and sometimes not) depending on the specific case.
> Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO
I dislike JSON. I think it has many problems, and that DER is a better format.
(There are also the "small web" protocols such as Gemini and Scorpion and Spartan and Titan, which avoids some of the complexity of HTTP; I had considered using DER-over-Scorpion rather than JSON-over-HTTP. It is also possible to use SSH, although SSH does not have virtual hosting.)
How much overhead do you think fetching emails over http takes? Fetching text documents with HTTP seems like the prime usecase for it. And it's the only way you could have something that works in web clients.
I'm struggling to think of any real benefits to not using HTTP other than it would be more interesting.
> Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days?
HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are binary protocols. And if you replace the JSON with CBOR, then even the payload becomes binary.
The reason for using HTTP is that the semantics are right. HTTP is a state transfer protocol, and ultimately, that's 90% of what you need for sync.
The other 10% is for subscriptions, updates, with versioning, and patches. You can get these by adding the Braid extensions (see braid.org) which upgrade HTTP from a state transfer to a state synchronization protocol. (I work on Braid.)
My hot take is that if the web had been based on binary protocols rather than HTML and JSON, the fragmentation of tooling that can instead be standardized as view-source and network-tabs would have decimated (as in removed 90% of) the hackers that make up this community, and software engineering in general.
There's no magic. Nothing sacred. Nothing that you aren't allowed to understand, intuitively. Nothing where you aren't allowed to imagine "what if it also had X?" The web is yours. The computer is yours. As an industry, we burn some incremental percentage of bandwidth to give you the keys to the kingdom, and to allow you, new developer, to be one of us.
In an age when LLMs feel like magic boxes to tech-minded people new to development, we need this more than ever.
Reading weirdly many “but there are no clients” posts. Of course something has to come first. You can’t really develop a client without a server implementation and Stalwart is essentially the first server implementation of JMAP.
With Stalwart in place, there’s finally a reason to develop a client for JMAP.
I hope y’all are aware that Mozilla’s new mail service will use it, so that is likely going to give JMAP a big push!
I'm cautiously optimistic that Stalwart is a game-changer. I would normally stick with a simpler platform (like mox) if I wasn't interested in the groupware space. I've previously tried Nextcloud and SoGo and left disappointed, and have more or less been waiting for a project like this to come along.
Nextcloud was such a terrible experience for me (the file sharing/storage was good, but the groupware aspect was incredibly buggy). But knowing that Nextcloud is partnering with Stalwart to hopefully overhaul their stack, Opencloud is developing their JMAP integration, and Mozilla/Thunderbird is using it too (they already have a webmail in development here: https://github.com/thunderbird/stormbox)... we might finally see some exciting development in this space. And now is also a ripe time, as there seems to be a perfect storm of people wanting to get away from Big Tech platforms.
We need better client support for JMAP. Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook (as if), and so on. I'm surprised some of the smaller ones like Canary or Spark don't implement it as a product differentiator.
One big differentiator is JMAP allows one network connection to track new emails that may get delivered across different folders. With IMAP you need a connection open for each folder.
I'd make a reasonable guess that it enables much better Javascript clients, either via Electron or the Web Browser.
You don't need major providers to support it, they support SMTP and that's how messages are relayed. JMAP is just so you: the client, can fetch your mail from wherever you host your mail.
IMAP is a shit protocol in general. Notably, email UIDs are not guaranteed to be static across sessions (aka, next time you connect they may be different), which is just straight up dumb. You IMAP client has to do a lot of workarounds just for this, which leads to gnarly bugs and inefficiences.
I don’t even remotely disagree with this. But that wasn’t the point: the point was that JMAP is only a competitive advantage if (major) email providers actually adopt it. Bad technologies regularly win because of inertia.
I’ve got a friend who’s been pitching me on building a new email client for years. “I’ll do it if we exclusively use JMAP.” “okay does that include Gmail and Apple/iCloud accounts?” “Nope.”
I could sort of see dual-supporting Gmail's proprietary API and JMAP, but unless the #2-5 competitors support it… what’s the point? (sorry to put on the pessimism hat)
There isn’t really a great motivating feature or use-case driving client or server adoption.
To be honest, I’m not sure why end-users would want JMAP for e-mail access.
It would be interesting if they do successfully roll out all of these additional RFC proposals providing a cohesive “groupware” protocol covering calendering, contacts, file shares, etc, we see notable server implementations, and interest is enough to drive client support.
People say things like that, and I wonder if I’ve just been living in a gilded tower of using Apple Mail with decent IMAP server implementations.
I’m also pretty familiar with the wire protocol and its implementation — it’s never struck me as particularly horrible.
A new protocol isn’t likely to solve the problem of poorly implemented clients and servers — e.g. Google doesn’t really care about good IMAP support, so they’re unlikely to care much about JMAP, either. They just want you to use their webapp.
What next? Replacing Sieve with something cumbersome, but JSON based?
There is no good desktop implementation of MUA with old technologies (IMAP, Sieve), will all this JMAP help?
I don't think so.
What is profit to have good server with new good (assume it is good, I'm not sure, but lets assume) protocols without good client?
IMAP4 is underused by modern clients: it allows to effectively store client configuration on server, nobody implements it on client side. It allows to configure per-folder Sieve scripts, nobody implements it on client side. Nobody implements good Sieve client (with folder name autocomplition and such) even for global script, not to mention per-folder ones. Heck, there is no good Sieve editor! (I know about Sieve client built on Electron, it is not good, it is incomplete and buggy).
Servers are solved problem (sendmail, exim, postfix, dovecot, cyrus). Clients are not, they stagnated at the moment GMail was announced.
Solved problem? Dovecot can't handle UTF-8 to this day. Things like Stalwart do try and change that and actually support non-legacy features. (Though I think Stalwart doesn't do IMAP NOTIFY either.)
Clients on the other hand have actually kinda moved forward, Apple Mail works with IMAP servers and offers features that people only got with Gmail before. But there are many other examples as well.
> What is profit to have good server with new good (assume it is good, I'm not sure, but lets assume) protocols without good client?
You need both. You could say, what profit is a good client without a server? By that reasoning, we never stake a step forward without a complete solution.
Now a better mail implementation is just a client away.
I worked on the iCalendar, CalDAV, and CardDAV parsers at Apple in 2010 or so, and I see no reason to believe that today’s Macs, iPhones, and Watches, are using anything more modern.
I haven’t been there in more than a decade. I really am curious what the response in Apple (and Google) is to this spec.
Of all of their proposals, this is the most interesting part to me.
I researched what it would take to implement a full calendaring server once, and after reading all the RFCs, just backed away slowly from the whole idea and never thought about it again.
It’s such a breeze to self-host your own email server using Stalwart. It has been a new era for email self-hosters like myself since these kind of fully integrated email servers like Stalwart appeared. Another good one but not as actively maintained is Maddy.
I'm setting up Stalwart right now, migrating from my current Maddy+Postfix+Dovecot+Rspamd setup. Not exactly my experience.
The documentation is not great - I'd say it's just about barely enough to get an overall idea, but there's no one proper single definitive overview of what options exist, what are their possible values, what are the defaults, and how they relate to each other. Maddy docs, despite looking a bit sloppy, were a lot easier to get through. IMHO Stalwart makes it unnecessarily difficult to write a non-minimal static configuration file, hooking everything up correctly.
To be fair, maybe there is a page like that but I haven't found it, despite trying.
I know the Web UI allows to do the configuration by clicking through the forms, but this approach conflicts with declarative deployment practices. In my case it's giving me nondescript 500 errors in the UI with "Failed to write local configuration" in the logs because the .toml file is read-only.
Not sure if yours is setup different, but there are several key fields that need to be written to the config.toml file, and I've seen my file get updated when I make changes to the listeners or stores settings.
But in general, I agree that it has not been a very smooth experience. Having messed around with maddy and mox, Stalwart has had quite a few gotchas. Despite being a single binary promising simplicity, I'm finding it to be a real challenge figuring out how it all fits together, and I'm mostly learning by trial and error since the documentation is often outdated.
My biggest gripe is that it doesn't use the config.toml for every setting, or at least doesn't seem to have the option to do so. I broke my installation and had to find the posgresql key-value pairs for the settings, which was made harder by the fact that everything was stored as binary, which also made me have to edit it as binary as well. These were very simple settings that would have been a breeze in a flat configuration file. I absolutely do not like how necessary the WebAdmin is to manage simple things.
That said, the integration with calendar/contacts is nice even without JMAP... Getting Thunderbird and Roundcube setup with plugins and proper settings made it so easy to get several users setup with calendars, contacts, and shared email-boxes and shared contacts right upon first login.
The S3 storage is also working great (Hetzner Frankfurt VPS paired with AWS eu-central-1), and AWS downtime a few days ago notwithstanding, I'm feeling good about the reliability that gives me, leaving me mainly with the PosgresQL data store the main thing to keep backed up.
This is a hugely ambitious software and as such, there will be many things that I will have a hard time getting used to as a hobbyist, but also a lot to be gained. I'm sticking around for now and waiting for version 1, improved documentation, and more clarity on how it all works.
I heard some second-hand accounts that Hetzner's object storage was pretty slow even in the same location. For email, that sounded not too ideal.
Also, I only have 5 mailboxes right now holding less than 15GB of data total... S3 is still cheaper than the minimum at Hetzner since I don't need anything close to a TB.
Yes, are there any decent JMAP web mail client that we can use?
I have asked sooo many times since Stalwart first was introduced, but not got a straight answer. It is just FastMail or Topicbox. I want something like roudcoube or wildduck that can be used over https that I can self-host!
I tried very hard to get it to work, but I simply couldn't get it to connect with my Stalwart instance over JMAP. I do have the permissive CORS and end-points and proxy-protocol seemingly working with my test HTTPS requests, and I also successfully got JMAP to work with the Mailtemi app, but no luck yet with Cypht[0].
Yeah that is kind of issue had me flintch when thinking of using stalwart. As much as it is so nice to install it as a server and ideologies behind it. Looks like gonna just stick with wildduck for now. Just don't like to hedge our email bets on mongodb community edition.
I do have to hand it to the developer though. This is some serious longterm commitment to an open standard that has simply never taken off beyond one company (Fastmail). Current JMAP implementation is pretty much nonexistent, and I am back to using IMAP/WebDAV with Roundcube and plugins with Stalwart. To me, this is an exercise in patience and waiting for an eventual payoff that may or may not come in the next two years. Having followed the project closely for over a year and gone through a few upgrades and followed the community, I'm still optimistic and happy to be along for the ride.
But is there any real benefit over Postfix + Dovecot other than "it's new and written in Rust?" Postfix and Dovecot have been around for decades and respect the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
Well yeah, they do one thing, but to do email well you need more than one thing. Dovecot is also kinda shit with UTF-8 support amongst other things. There are plenty of reasons to not use that combination.
It's one tiny binary that does everything you could possibly need for hosting a mail server, including an admin UI, and you get a bunch of modern and convenient features for free.
For example, it automatically handles Let's Encrypt certs for you. You get JMAP, CalDAV, WebDAV, CardDAV, IMAP4rev2, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE, spam filtering, SQL+blob+object storage backends, search, clustering, OpenTelemetry, etc all in one tiny binary.
Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version and I think the dev team is one guy, or at least it was a while ago.
Having ran both for a long time, I'm sticking with Stalwart from now on as long as development continues.
For those needing to deal with customers/clients/internal teams with Google Workspace/Outlook and wanting JMAP-style (though not JMAP) modern JSON APIs, Nylas might be a viable option: https://www.nylas.com/
Nylas pricing has gotten better recently, but is still quite high though - at $1.50/connected account/month at scale, it's likely material to your per-user margin if it's part of your SaaS offering.
But if you have a use case where this is a no-brainer (like capturing/analyzing/building custom real-time UI around your internal sales team's emails) then it's remarkably powerful.
> They are robust, widely adopted, and battle-tested. Yet, their XML-based design is notoriously verbose, inconsistent, and difficult to implement correctly. Information is scattered across HTTP headers, XML payloads, and even embedded iCalendar data, creating endless compatibility and interoperability challenges between clients and servers.
Can others confirm if these problems are widespread? I get that these protocols are probably a pain to develop for but given they are "robust, widely adopted and battle-tested" it seems that is probably a solved problem. It's better to have one standard that is used everywhere than to have to choose between two standards.
Does it seem like the calendar protocol will be able to replace the VTODO bit of ical so that Todo applications can be built on top of it? I've played around with ics files a bit for the tasks app in nextcloud and it wasn't a pleasant experience so I kinda dropped the project.
I can understand why JMAP instead of IMAP given the latter's antiquated design. I don't see the advantage to clients in replacing WebDAV though, and the others are a bit iffy too. They'll need to make a way better sales pitch than 'JSON vs XML' (serialization ain't tough, XML is supported everywhere).
I guess contacts/calendar follows JMAP naturally when the clients already implement it, but that only applies in the 'already wrote a JMAP email client' case. Virtually any other case would rather stay with widely supported protocols?
They make breaking changes to settings (and possibly data stores, but I forget) between versions, so to go from, for example, x.y.1 to x.z.5 might involve doing migrations between x.y.2 through x.z.5 just to use the latest version.
This is not the case for all versions, but I've found it to be common enough that I have to read all of the release notes between point versions when upgrading.
Running Stalwart in production for ~20 heavily used accounts for some company and no problems so far! The simplicity for such a complex stack and flexibility of deployments is off the charts!
Out of curiosity do you front-end SMTP with postfix to have many queues/MX entries and a battle hardened front-end or is Stalwart handling inbound connections directly? Im thinking of moving from Dovecot to Stalwart so family members have more modern features on my fallback domains about half of my domains do not use Fastmail. In multiple companies I had several Postfix inbound servers to keep the internet from touching Exchange directly and have multiple nodes for companies to quickly hand off to in multiple locations.
> Stalwart Enterprise leverages AI technology to provide unparalleled email security and management. With AI-powered features, Stalwart Enterprise excels in accurately classifying spam, detecting sophisticated phishing attempts, and blocking various types of network attacks. This intelligent approach ensures that your email environment remains secure and reliable. Stalwart Enterprise comes equipped with a pre-trained large language model (LLM), offering robust out-of-the-box protection. Additionally, it supports integration with leading AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and other cutting-edge platforms, allowing you to enhance and customize your security measures. By utilizing AI, Stalwart Enterprise delivers a smarter, more efficient email solution that proactively safeguards your communications and data.
Anyone got a link to a better sales job on JMAP & friends?
It sounds awesome but the way it is intro'd here:
Over the past few years, the IETF has been redefining how email, calendars, and contacts are synchronized and shared. Building upon the success of JMAP for Mail, several new protocol extensions have been introduced:
JMAP for Calendars - A modern replacement for CalDAV and CalDAV Scheduling.
JMAP for Contacts – A powerful alternative to CardDAV.
JMAP for File Storage – A replacement for WebDAV-based file storage.
JMAP Sharing – A modern successor to WebDAV ACL.
JSCalendar - A clean, JSON-based evolution of iCalendar.
JSContact – A modernized, JSON-native successor to vCard.
...gave me pause. A protocol I've never heard even though I hang out here for an hour a day, was so successful, that it launched 6 new projects?
Sounds more like the parts of the web dev that give me ick (new and shiny; rush to copy new and shiny in other contexts; give it a year; and all of a sudden only 1 of the 6 actually was successful)
The big pitch for JMAP is for a modern web-tech-only approach to email/calendar/"groupware" servers. One reason to do that would be to make it easier to also build email/calendar/"groupware" clients entirely out of modern web-tech. Today most "web email clients" are bespoke to specific stacks/email servers. A dream of JMAP is that with the right CORS policy a single web client could interact with multiple JMAP servers, using only fetch/XHR.
The modernization efforts of JMAP are interesting, too. Most of the old protocols are a mess of bespoke plaintext formats full of quirks evolved over decades in a giant mess of different software. Even the stuff that was already web tech like WebDAV and its extensions CalDAV and CardDAV were full of quirks, violated some REST "rules", and originally intended for a different purpose (file shares/FTP replacement). JMAP is much closer to "plain REST" than WebDAV's complex HTTP protocol extensions/changes.
Counterpoint: I Google'd "jmap gmail" and a top result is a comment from HN in 2019 saying Gmail will never implement JMAP (it has not)
That's a really cruel response, because this is important work. I don't want my kids beholden to bigco.
I think it's real & important.
I also wanna make sure people like me, who have to keep tabs on the intersection of "how can I help liberate from BigCo" and "how can I make a livable wage doing so"
It is, quite literally, real, but also something you shouldn't waste time on if you're already busy. (c.f. https://jmap.io/software.html)
JMAP and friends are very niche, none of the "mainstream" email clients (that ship with most computers/phones) support it. So this feature being available is unlikely to grow the userbase, IMO.
Now JMAP is quite a bit nicer to use than IMAP's API, but IMAP's gravitational field is too strong to be supplanted. IMAP is also becoming somewhat of a niche protocol, as the majority of users use vendor proprietary protocols for accessing their emails on Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, etc. So why invest the time to add a niche replacement for IMAP when the entire protocol is a second class citizen to mainstream email clients.
Stalwart is, from what I’ve read, an excellent JMAP server.
JMAP is, from what I’ve read, a great protocol for building an E-Mail (and now also others) client on top of.
Since I would like an innovative way to access my E-Mails, but do not want to self-host, I would find it interesting to use Stalwart as the server component of an E-Mail client: Data is somehow synced into Stalwart via the “ugly” protocols and I get a nice API to build an elegant client on top of.
My basic research shows that something like IMAP-IMAP sync seems to be a thing. Has anyone done something like this, perhaps even with Stalwart? (this of course grows in complexity for each new protocol to be proxied).
I believe having this kind of setup easily accessible could jumpstart a new generation of E-Mail clients on top of JMAP because it (relatively elegantly?) circumvents the chicken-egg problem by allowing all existing IMAP mailboxes to be accessed via JMAP.
I have been looking for something like this for ages. Everything I found so far is overpriced, so this is great development.
i have also been pondering this for the exact same reason... unfortunately, i don't have much to show for said pondering... yet...
I really hope Fastmail implements the JMAP spec for calendars and contacts soon. They’ve had the mail part of the spec implemented for a while, but it still requires CardDAV/CalDAV for contacts and calendar access.
What good is a protocol like JMAP as long as common clients like Thunderbird, K-9 Mail, the iPhone email client and others don't support it? Without some concerted effort it will never take off. Then there is the question of what problem it solves that isn't already solved by existing solutions.
Next time an iCal event invitation screws up the time zone, return to this question.
JMAP works in my email client, aerc.
I don’t think JMAP Calendar spec has been ratified yet.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap-calendars/
And Contacts was only 10-months ago.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9610.html
While JMAP seems to scratch every itch of a sucker for proper web API design, I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP. Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days? Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO. Then again, a lot of solid thinking went into these things, so there probably are a lot of good reasons that I’m not aware of.
Still, it’s an interesting space, I think.
> binary protocol
Email was never a binary protocol. Notoriously so, it's why MIME types and MIME encodings get so complicated.
Most of the "old internet" protocols (email, FTP, even HTTP itself) were bootstrapped on top of built-mostly-for-plaintext Telnet. HTTP as the new telnet has a bunch of improvements when it comes to binary data, request/response-based data flows, and some other considerations. HTTP/3 is even inherently a binary protocol, it's lack of "telnet-compatibility" one of the concerns about switching the majority of the web to it.
vCard/vCal/iCard/iCal were also deeply "plaintext formats". JSON is an improvement because it is more structured, even more efficient, than those predecessors. JSON may not look efficient, but it compresses extremely well and can be quite efficient in gzip and Brotli streams.
I feel like "JSON over HTTP" is a subtle improvement over "custom text formats over telnet", even if it doesn't sound like "binary protocol efficiency" at first glance. Especially as HTTP/3 pushes HTTP more efficient and more "binary", and arguably "more fundamental/basic" with HTTP/3 even taking over more roles in the TCP/UDP layer of the internet stack. (Telnet would never try to replace TCP.) HTTP isn't the worst bootstrap layer the internet could use to build new protocols and apps on top of. Sure, it would be neat to see more variety and experiments outside of the HTTP stack, too, but HTTP is too useful at this point not to build a bunch of things on top of it instead of as their own from-scratch protocol.
A lot of the textual nature of older IETF protocols, including the CR LF line endigns, can be probably traced to how easy it was to bang out a bad implementation full of subtle problems that could be debugged by sitting an undergrad student at a teletype instead of spending time on having some binary serializer (that telecom companies definitely had money for)
Yeah, a fair bit of email protocol reeks of "is this tolerant of `telnet mailserver 25` and whatever garbage that might produce".
A lot of old RFCs explicitly mention running on top of TELNET.
Additionally, as much people like to harp about "telcos focusing on connection-oriented protocols while we ran loops around them with packets", the reality is that NCP and later TCP pretty much focused on emulating serial lines around, and one of the earliest ways to access ARPAnet outside of machines directly on it was through calling into a TIP which set up bidirectional stream from your modem to a port on some host.
It's also a reflection of the state-of-the-art at the time. Binary protocols were an unmitigated disaster, with standards bodies thinking that applying to the ISO for your organizational ID is a perfectly fine step that anyone does anyway.
That's why there was an entire section for unassigned numbers.
Binary protocols just meant you actually needed to implement serialiser/deserialiser and similar tooling instead of writing dumbest possible riff on strtok() and hoping your software won't be used anymore once DoD internet becomes mature
It’s not that I cannot appreciate the improvements in the space, I’m just wondering if there might be a big part of the design space for widely used protocols that ends up unexplored because the default for almost anything now is HTTP. It has basically become OSI layer 8 at this point.
MIME/Content-Negotiation is essentially OSI Presentation Layer
HTTP sorta acts as stump of ROSE with bit of ACSE. In addition it provides a bit of basic layer for passing some extra attributes that might be considered in-band or out (or side?) band to the actual exchange.
> Notoriously so, it's why MIME types and MIME encodings get so complicated.
I made up ULFI because I thought MIME has some problems.
> JSON may not look efficient
Efficiency is not the only issue; there is also the consideration of e.g. what data types you want to use. JSON does not have a proper integer type, does not have a proper binary data type (you must encode it as hex or base64 instead), and is limited about what character sets can be used.
(Also, like other text formats, escaping will be needed.)
> I feel like "JSON over HTTP" is a subtle improvement over "custom text formats over telnet"
I think it can be, depending on the specific use; sometimes it isn't, and will make it worse. (HTTP does have the advantage of having URLs and virtual hosting, although I think it adds too much complexity more than should be needed.) However, I still think that DER is generally better than JSON.
> HTTP isn't the worst bootstrap layer the internet could use to build new protocols and apps on top of.
I think it depends on the specific application. However, even then, I think there are better ways than using HTTP with the complexity that it involves, most of which should not be necessary (even though a few parts are helpful, such as virtual hosting).
If the answer is monetary values, then those should never be floats, and should not be represented in JSON as such. E.g. a dollar and a half should be represented as 150 cents. This follows even for sub-cent precision.
I don't mean 32-bit integers, but rather, 64-bit (and sometimes bigger) integers. JSON already works OK for 32-bit integers (although it is not ideal).
Another point is that the use of HTTP for everything, outside of the issue of middle boxes breaking protocols for everyone, is that it's essentially capitulation to the wisdom of OSI multi-layered protocols - we replicate their feature sets by reusing bits and pieces of HTTP spec all the time.
HTTP is also a large, complex stack for any server/client that isn’t already a web server or a browser.
Yes, this is the other issue with using HTTP.
> Most of the "old internet" protocols (email, FTP, even HTTP itself) were bootstrapped on top of built-mostly-for-plaintext Telnet.
That's just not true. Telnet and SMTP are built on top of TCP. They live on the same layer. They were originally both protocols that transmitted data with printable ascii, hence why they look similar. There are many other protocols like Telnet and SMTP that worked like that, auch as nntp, irc, and yes, even http.
I think that the point is this: You could literally use a telnet client to talk to all of those servers and it was considered a good thing, maybe even an essential feature. So protocol design was somehow influenced by the need to be fully plain text ASCII streams (and maybe that other options weren't adequately explored due to this restriction)
You can also telnet into port 80 and communicate with an HTTP server.
> I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP
It shouldn't. For some cases it helps, but other times it doesn't. Sometimes it helps but there would be better ways to do it, making it on a simpler protocol or making an entirely new protocol (which might or might not use TCP; sometimes it is better to use TCP and sometimes not) depending on the specific case.
> Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO
I dislike JSON. I think it has many problems, and that DER is a better format.
(There are also the "small web" protocols such as Gemini and Scorpion and Spartan and Titan, which avoids some of the complexity of HTTP; I had considered using DER-over-Scorpion rather than JSON-over-HTTP. It is also possible to use SSH, although SSH does not have virtual hosting.)
How much overhead do you think fetching emails over http takes? Fetching text documents with HTTP seems like the prime usecase for it. And it's the only way you could have something that works in web clients.
I'm struggling to think of any real benefits to not using HTTP other than it would be more interesting.
> Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days?
HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are binary protocols. And if you replace the JSON with CBOR, then even the payload becomes binary.
The reason for using HTTP is that the semantics are right. HTTP is a state transfer protocol, and ultimately, that's 90% of what you need for sync.
The other 10% is for subscriptions, updates, with versioning, and patches. You can get these by adding the Braid extensions (see braid.org) which upgrade HTTP from a state transfer to a state synchronization protocol. (I work on Braid.)
My hot take is that if the web had been based on binary protocols rather than HTML and JSON, the fragmentation of tooling that can instead be standardized as view-source and network-tabs would have decimated (as in removed 90% of) the hackers that make up this community, and software engineering in general.
There's no magic. Nothing sacred. Nothing that you aren't allowed to understand, intuitively. Nothing where you aren't allowed to imagine "what if it also had X?" The web is yours. The computer is yours. As an industry, we burn some incremental percentage of bandwidth to give you the keys to the kingdom, and to allow you, new developer, to be one of us.
In an age when LLMs feel like magic boxes to tech-minded people new to development, we need this more than ever.
> I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP.
Absolutely yes, IMO. This significantly eases web client development.
I wonder if you could transparently upgrade to CBOR over HTTP/2.
Reading weirdly many “but there are no clients” posts. Of course something has to come first. You can’t really develop a client without a server implementation and Stalwart is essentially the first server implementation of JMAP.
With Stalwart in place, there’s finally a reason to develop a client for JMAP.
I hope y’all are aware that Mozilla’s new mail service will use it, so that is likely going to give JMAP a big push!
I'm cautiously optimistic that Stalwart is a game-changer. I would normally stick with a simpler platform (like mox) if I wasn't interested in the groupware space. I've previously tried Nextcloud and SoGo and left disappointed, and have more or less been waiting for a project like this to come along.
Nextcloud was such a terrible experience for me (the file sharing/storage was good, but the groupware aspect was incredibly buggy). But knowing that Nextcloud is partnering with Stalwart to hopefully overhaul their stack, Opencloud is developing their JMAP integration, and Mozilla/Thunderbird is using it too (they already have a webmail in development here: https://github.com/thunderbird/stormbox)... we might finally see some exciting development in this space. And now is also a ripe time, as there seems to be a perfect storm of people wanting to get away from Big Tech platforms.
There are clients. I use one called aerc.
Cyrus was probably the first
We need better client support for JMAP. Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook (as if), and so on. I'm surprised some of the smaller ones like Canary or Spark don't implement it as a product differentiator.
Serious question: what’s the differentiator if major email providers don’t support it?
(This should not be interpreted as a defense of IMAP.)
One big differentiator is JMAP allows one network connection to track new emails that may get delivered across different folders. With IMAP you need a connection open for each folder.
Why is that necessarily a good thing? If there's a problem with one folder - or just a large email - all are delayed?
Implementing IMAP NOTIFY [1] would be a simpler path assuming you have IMAP implemented already though.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5465.html
Okay, that's a great feature! But I guess I'm asking what the differentiator is if major email providers don't use it.
I'd make a reasonable guess that it enables much better Javascript clients, either via Electron or the Web Browser.
You don't need major providers to support it, they support SMTP and that's how messages are relayed. JMAP is just so you: the client, can fetch your mail from wherever you host your mail.
Fastmail supports it, and it sounds like Thundermail will too
Thundermail will be built on Stalwart, so yeah :)
IMAP is a shit protocol in general. Notably, email UIDs are not guaranteed to be static across sessions (aka, next time you connect they may be different), which is just straight up dumb. You IMAP client has to do a lot of workarounds just for this, which leads to gnarly bugs and inefficiences.
I don’t even remotely disagree with this. But that wasn’t the point: the point was that JMAP is only a competitive advantage if (major) email providers actually adopt it. Bad technologies regularly win because of inertia.
We need better server support first.
I’ve got a friend who’s been pitching me on building a new email client for years. “I’ll do it if we exclusively use JMAP.” “okay does that include Gmail and Apple/iCloud accounts?” “Nope.”
I could sort of see dual-supporting Gmail's proprietary API and JMAP, but unless the #2-5 competitors support it… what’s the point? (sorry to put on the pessimism hat)
There isn’t really a great motivating feature or use-case driving client or server adoption.
To be honest, I’m not sure why end-users would want JMAP for e-mail access.
It would be interesting if they do successfully roll out all of these additional RFC proposals providing a cohesive “groupware” protocol covering calendering, contacts, file shares, etc, we see notable server implementations, and interest is enough to drive client support.
That’s a lot of “ifs”.
Because IMAP is horrible, it is another driving reason why we are moving towards the dystopian world of webmail.
Horrible how, exactly?
People say things like that, and I wonder if I’ve just been living in a gilded tower of using Apple Mail with decent IMAP server implementations.
I’m also pretty familiar with the wire protocol and its implementation — it’s never struck me as particularly horrible.
A new protocol isn’t likely to solve the problem of poorly implemented clients and servers — e.g. Google doesn’t really care about good IMAP support, so they’re unlikely to care much about JMAP, either. They just want you to use their webapp.
Gilded tower? Are we living in separate universes?
Shameless plug for a client with true offline-first IMAP support:
https://marcoapp.io
What next? Replacing Sieve with something cumbersome, but JSON based?
There is no good desktop implementation of MUA with old technologies (IMAP, Sieve), will all this JMAP help?
I don't think so.
What is profit to have good server with new good (assume it is good, I'm not sure, but lets assume) protocols without good client?
IMAP4 is underused by modern clients: it allows to effectively store client configuration on server, nobody implements it on client side. It allows to configure per-folder Sieve scripts, nobody implements it on client side. Nobody implements good Sieve client (with folder name autocomplition and such) even for global script, not to mention per-folder ones. Heck, there is no good Sieve editor! (I know about Sieve client built on Electron, it is not good, it is incomplete and buggy).
Servers are solved problem (sendmail, exim, postfix, dovecot, cyrus). Clients are not, they stagnated at the moment GMail was announced.
Solved problem? Dovecot can't handle UTF-8 to this day. Things like Stalwart do try and change that and actually support non-legacy features. (Though I think Stalwart doesn't do IMAP NOTIFY either.)
Clients on the other hand have actually kinda moved forward, Apple Mail works with IMAP servers and offers features that people only got with Gmail before. But there are many other examples as well.
> What is profit to have good server with new good (assume it is good, I'm not sure, but lets assume) protocols without good client?
You need both. You could say, what profit is a good client without a server? By that reasoning, we never stake a step forward without a complete solution.
Now a better mail implementation is just a client away.
I worked on the iCalendar, CalDAV, and CardDAV parsers at Apple in 2010 or so, and I see no reason to believe that today’s Macs, iPhones, and Watches, are using anything more modern.
I haven’t been there in more than a decade. I really am curious what the response in Apple (and Google) is to this spec.
Of all of their proposals, this is the most interesting part to me.
I researched what it would take to implement a full calendaring server once, and after reading all the RFCs, just backed away slowly from the whole idea and never thought about it again.
Yeah. It’s a super messy domain. You never know when the parliament of Brazil will pass a law changing the time zone definition.
It’s such a breeze to self-host your own email server using Stalwart. It has been a new era for email self-hosters like myself since these kind of fully integrated email servers like Stalwart appeared. Another good one but not as actively maintained is Maddy.
I'm setting up Stalwart right now, migrating from my current Maddy+Postfix+Dovecot+Rspamd setup. Not exactly my experience.
The documentation is not great - I'd say it's just about barely enough to get an overall idea, but there's no one proper single definitive overview of what options exist, what are their possible values, what are the defaults, and how they relate to each other. Maddy docs, despite looking a bit sloppy, were a lot easier to get through. IMHO Stalwart makes it unnecessarily difficult to write a non-minimal static configuration file, hooking everything up correctly.
To be fair, maybe there is a page like that but I haven't found it, despite trying.
I know the Web UI allows to do the configuration by clicking through the forms, but this approach conflicts with declarative deployment practices. In my case it's giving me nondescript 500 errors in the UI with "Failed to write local configuration" in the logs because the .toml file is read-only.
Not sure if yours is setup different, but there are several key fields that need to be written to the config.toml file, and I've seen my file get updated when I make changes to the listeners or stores settings.
But in general, I agree that it has not been a very smooth experience. Having messed around with maddy and mox, Stalwart has had quite a few gotchas. Despite being a single binary promising simplicity, I'm finding it to be a real challenge figuring out how it all fits together, and I'm mostly learning by trial and error since the documentation is often outdated.
My biggest gripe is that it doesn't use the config.toml for every setting, or at least doesn't seem to have the option to do so. I broke my installation and had to find the posgresql key-value pairs for the settings, which was made harder by the fact that everything was stored as binary, which also made me have to edit it as binary as well. These were very simple settings that would have been a breeze in a flat configuration file. I absolutely do not like how necessary the WebAdmin is to manage simple things.
That said, the integration with calendar/contacts is nice even without JMAP... Getting Thunderbird and Roundcube setup with plugins and proper settings made it so easy to get several users setup with calendars, contacts, and shared email-boxes and shared contacts right upon first login.
The S3 storage is also working great (Hetzner Frankfurt VPS paired with AWS eu-central-1), and AWS downtime a few days ago notwithstanding, I'm feeling good about the reliability that gives me, leaving me mainly with the PosgresQL data store the main thing to keep backed up.
This is a hugely ambitious software and as such, there will be many things that I will have a hard time getting used to as a hobbyist, but also a lot to be gained. I'm sticking around for now and waiting for version 1, improved documentation, and more clarity on how it all works.
Is there a reason you use aws s3 vs the hetzner object storage?
I heard some second-hand accounts that Hetzner's object storage was pretty slow even in the same location. For email, that sounded not too ideal.
Also, I only have 5 mailboxes right now holding less than 15GB of data total... S3 is still cheaper than the minimum at Hetzner since I don't need anything close to a TB.
Yes, are there any decent JMAP web mail client that we can use?
I have asked sooo many times since Stalwart first was introduced, but not got a straight answer. It is just FastMail or Topicbox. I want something like roudcoube or wildduck that can be used over https that I can self-host!
It looks like Cypht [0] is the most actively maintained JMAP webmail client listed at [1], assuming that works.
I tried very hard to get it to work, but I simply couldn't get it to connect with my Stalwart instance over JMAP. I do have the permissive CORS and end-points and proxy-protocol seemingly working with my test HTTPS requests, and I also successfully got JMAP to work with the Mailtemi app, but no luck yet with Cypht[0].
Darn. This looks like the open issue: https://github.com/cypht-org/cypht/issues/931
Yeah that is kind of issue had me flintch when thinking of using stalwart. As much as it is so nice to install it as a server and ideologies behind it. Looks like gonna just stick with wildduck for now. Just don't like to hedge our email bets on mongodb community edition.
I do have to hand it to the developer though. This is some serious longterm commitment to an open standard that has simply never taken off beyond one company (Fastmail). Current JMAP implementation is pretty much nonexistent, and I am back to using IMAP/WebDAV with Roundcube and plugins with Stalwart. To me, this is an exercise in patience and waiting for an eventual payoff that may or may not come in the next two years. Having followed the project closely for over a year and gone through a few upgrades and followed the community, I'm still optimistic and happy to be along for the ride.
But is there any real benefit over Postfix + Dovecot other than "it's new and written in Rust?" Postfix and Dovecot have been around for decades and respect the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
Well yeah, they do one thing, but to do email well you need more than one thing. Dovecot is also kinda shit with UTF-8 support amongst other things. There are plenty of reasons to not use that combination.
It's one tiny binary that does everything you could possibly need for hosting a mail server, including an admin UI, and you get a bunch of modern and convenient features for free.
For example, it automatically handles Let's Encrypt certs for you. You get JMAP, CalDAV, WebDAV, CardDAV, IMAP4rev2, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE, spam filtering, SQL+blob+object storage backends, search, clustering, OpenTelemetry, etc all in one tiny binary.
Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version and I think the dev team is one guy, or at least it was a while ago.
Having ran both for a long time, I'm sticking with Stalwart from now on as long as development continues.
For those needing to deal with customers/clients/internal teams with Google Workspace/Outlook and wanting JMAP-style (though not JMAP) modern JSON APIs, Nylas might be a viable option: https://www.nylas.com/
Nylas pricing has gotten better recently, but is still quite high though - at $1.50/connected account/month at scale, it's likely material to your per-user margin if it's part of your SaaS offering.
But if you have a use case where this is a no-brainer (like capturing/analyzing/building custom real-time UI around your internal sales team's emails) then it's remarkably powerful.
> They are robust, widely adopted, and battle-tested. Yet, their XML-based design is notoriously verbose, inconsistent, and difficult to implement correctly. Information is scattered across HTTP headers, XML payloads, and even embedded iCalendar data, creating endless compatibility and interoperability challenges between clients and servers.
Can others confirm if these problems are widespread? I get that these protocols are probably a pain to develop for but given they are "robust, widely adopted and battle-tested" it seems that is probably a solved problem. It's better to have one standard that is used everywhere than to have to choose between two standards.
You're right to ask it
Always relevant: https://xkcd.com/927/
One of the handful of xkcd numbers I recognize without having to open.
Does it seem like the calendar protocol will be able to replace the VTODO bit of ical so that Todo applications can be built on top of it? I've played around with ics files a bit for the tasks app in nextcloud and it wasn't a pleasant experience so I kinda dropped the project.
I can understand why JMAP instead of IMAP given the latter's antiquated design. I don't see the advantage to clients in replacing WebDAV though, and the others are a bit iffy too. They'll need to make a way better sales pitch than 'JSON vs XML' (serialization ain't tough, XML is supported everywhere).
I guess contacts/calendar follows JMAP naturally when the clients already implement it, but that only applies in the 'already wrote a JMAP email client' case. Virtually any other case would rather stay with widely supported protocols?
Yeah because everything already supports WebDAV. It works well with iOS and Android which is imo a big advantage.
However, doesn't stalwart already also support WebDAV though?
I wish there was an easy auto-update process for Stalwart. is anyone hosting an apt repo for it?
edit: we use it on very resource constrained environments, the container version is too much overhead.
Where is the overhead in a container? It is just a regular process. (Ok plus a container runtime process, but that is negligible)
Does podman have a container runtime process? Or does it just exec the child after setting up the environment?
In that case the overhead is just a small amount of kernel accounting.
negligible for you, perhaps ;)
What resource constraints allow you to apt-get but not docker pull? It’s the same resulting stack isn’t it?
I am most curious
isn't it a static binary? Can't you do it the old-school sysadmin way and pull down a binary from github releases and update a symbolic link?
They make breaking changes to settings (and possibly data stores, but I forget) between versions, so to go from, for example, x.y.1 to x.z.5 might involve doing migrations between x.y.2 through x.z.5 just to use the latest version.
This is not the case for all versions, but I've found it to be common enough that I have to read all of the release notes between point versions when upgrading.
It can definitely be improved.
yes, but that’s not as simple as apt automatic upgrades
want me to write the script out for you?
1. systemd timer
2. curl github api
3. if new release, fetch, verify checksum
4. update symlink
5. restart service
i don’t think repackaging is actually easier here, for main services of a system is ok to skip the package manager.
You will eventually break your email setup by doing this, see my other comment.
Running Stalwart in production for ~20 heavily used accounts for some company and no problems so far! The simplicity for such a complex stack and flexibility of deployments is off the charts!
Out of curiosity do you front-end SMTP with postfix to have many queues/MX entries and a battle hardened front-end or is Stalwart handling inbound connections directly? Im thinking of moving from Dovecot to Stalwart so family members have more modern features on my fallback domains about half of my domains do not use Fastmail. In multiple companies I had several Postfix inbound servers to keep the internet from touching Exchange directly and have multiple nodes for companies to quickly hand off to in multiple locations.
I second that; only running it for personal use on a few domains, but handles all the complexity _extremely_ easily.
I didn't realize JMAP had a file system protocol. I'd be very interested to learn how it compares to Solid.
If the Mimestream mail app supported JMAP, I'd be switching away from Gmail asap.
if they pull out the AI stuff that'll be soooo cool :D
What AI stuff are you referring to? I just learned about this project from this blog post, so I don't have the full context on their AI work.
From the site [0]:
> Stalwart Enterprise leverages AI technology to provide unparalleled email security and management. With AI-powered features, Stalwart Enterprise excels in accurately classifying spam, detecting sophisticated phishing attempts, and blocking various types of network attacks. This intelligent approach ensures that your email environment remains secure and reliable. Stalwart Enterprise comes equipped with a pre-trained large language model (LLM), offering robust out-of-the-box protection. Additionally, it supports integration with leading AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and other cutting-edge platforms, allowing you to enhance and customize your security measures. By utilizing AI, Stalwart Enterprise delivers a smarter, more efficient email solution that proactively safeguards your communications and data.
[0]: https://stalw.art/enterprise/
It seems the enterprise edition has AI features and the community version doesn't. So if you don't want AI, use the community version.
https://stalw.art/compare/
Why does the optional (supported only in the enterprise version) feature bother you?
Do you mean the spam detection algorythm or something else?
Anyone got a link to a better sales job on JMAP & friends?
It sounds awesome but the way it is intro'd here:
...gave me pause. A protocol I've never heard even though I hang out here for an hour a day, was so successful, that it launched 6 new projects?Sounds more like the parts of the web dev that give me ick (new and shiny; rush to copy new and shiny in other contexts; give it a year; and all of a sudden only 1 of the 6 actually was successful)
The big pitch for JMAP is for a modern web-tech-only approach to email/calendar/"groupware" servers. One reason to do that would be to make it easier to also build email/calendar/"groupware" clients entirely out of modern web-tech. Today most "web email clients" are bespoke to specific stacks/email servers. A dream of JMAP is that with the right CORS policy a single web client could interact with multiple JMAP servers, using only fetch/XHR.
The modernization efforts of JMAP are interesting, too. Most of the old protocols are a mess of bespoke plaintext formats full of quirks evolved over decades in a giant mess of different software. Even the stuff that was already web tech like WebDAV and its extensions CalDAV and CardDAV were full of quirks, violated some REST "rules", and originally intended for a different purpose (file shares/FTP replacement). JMAP is much closer to "plain REST" than WebDAV's complex HTTP protocol extensions/changes.
You may only just have heard of them, but the WG goes back to 2017.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/history/
Bron is the principal of fastmail, who now own pobox. This is a serious activity.
Counterpoint: I Google'd "jmap gmail" and a top result is a comment from HN in 2019 saying Gmail will never implement JMAP (it has not)
That's a really cruel response, because this is important work. I don't want my kids beholden to bigco.
I think it's real & important.
I also wanna make sure people like me, who have to keep tabs on the intersection of "how can I help liberate from BigCo" and "how can I make a livable wage doing so"
It is, quite literally, real, but also something you shouldn't waste time on if you're already busy. (c.f. https://jmap.io/software.html)
If you look it up, you'll see that JMAP is 6 years old now. It's a protocol for doing email (and now other things) over HTTP, without many of the legacy issues from IMAP and SMTP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol / https://jmap.io/index.html
JMAP and friends are very niche, none of the "mainstream" email clients (that ship with most computers/phones) support it. So this feature being available is unlikely to grow the userbase, IMO.
Now JMAP is quite a bit nicer to use than IMAP's API, but IMAP's gravitational field is too strong to be supplanted. IMAP is also becoming somewhat of a niche protocol, as the majority of users use vendor proprietary protocols for accessing their emails on Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, etc. So why invest the time to add a niche replacement for IMAP when the entire protocol is a second class citizen to mainstream email clients.
Agreed, also not clear what this or why it matters. This is a new self-hostable email server basically?