JMAP – a much needed modern email open standard

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
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  • jmap

    JSON Meta Application Protocol Specification (JMAP)

  • mail-server

    Secure & Modern All-in-One Mail Server (IMAP, JMAP, SMTP)

  • All these features were already implemented except MinIO/S3. Development progress can be tracked at https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server/tree/main/crates...

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • email-oauth2-proxy

    An IMAP/POP/SMTP proxy that transparently adds OAuth 2.0 authentication for email clients that don't support this method.

  • https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy

    "Just works" I run it with mbsync at the command line.

    You do need a client id and some interaction with your O365 admin.

  • Mailspring

    :love_letter: A beautiful, fast and fully open source mail client for Mac, Windows and Linux.

  • I was hopeful that https://www.nylas.com/ would be the de-facto "adapter" placing a common API surface on top of the major providers and dragging them into a modern-API world. They even had an email client of their own as a proof of concept (forked by one of the original authors as https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring - and its reusable core https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring-Sync may be interesting to many here). But they've pivoted towards making their API only available behind B2B contracts and opaque pricing, and primarily used for corporate email monitoring and CRM use cases - perhaps because security and privacy considerations are nontrivial. I'm still rooting for them but it's a shadow of what it could have been.

  • Mailspring-Sync

  • I was hopeful that https://www.nylas.com/ would be the de-facto "adapter" placing a common API surface on top of the major providers and dragging them into a modern-API world. They even had an email client of their own as a proof of concept (forked by one of the original authors as https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring - and its reusable core https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring-Sync may be interesting to many here). But they've pivoted towards making their API only available behind B2B contracts and opaque pricing, and primarily used for corporate email monitoring and CRM use cases - perhaps because security and privacy considerations are nontrivial. I'm still rooting for them but it's a shadow of what it could have been.

  • FairEmail

    Fully featured, open source, privacy friendly email app for Android

  • jmap-demo-webmail

    Demo JMAP Webmail Client

  • Only servers I'm aware of that support JMAP are Cyrus and James. Clients do seem to be thin on the ground right now, with https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-demo-webmail still being the one to use (as far as I know).

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • jmap-perl

    JMAP Proxy implemented in Perl

  • There's software like https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl but that seems like more headache than it's worth unless your imap implementation/lib is incredibly complicated.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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