Hacker News Reader

Comment by popzq | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular prediction: Gmail will never implement JMAP, so it's already dead in the water.

Gmail on Android is already embarrassingly bad for IMAP... The minimum sync period is 15 minutes and it won't sync subfolders until you open them, defeating the entire point.

Don't look to Google to do anything in this space but continue to push their creepy ads and lock people in.

What I want to know is whether JMAP can help push end to end encrypted email for everyone. Probably not, because that's not part of FastMail's feature set.

Why wouldn't Google implement JMAP? Interestingly enough JMAP adds support for Gmail-specific behaviors like labels, which IMAP lacks. This would allow other apps and services to better integrate with Gmail's quirky behavior, improving the experience for Gmail users.

IMAP doesn't lack Gmail's "labels", Gmail just never bothered implementing their labels as IMAP labels, leading to every IMAP client requiring horrible hacks to work around Gmail's inane implementation.

Google are unlikely to implement JMAP for the same reason they've:

- ignored pleas to implement IMAP properly going back to its inception

- have IMAP disabled by default for new users, and for most corporate users (requiring a GSuite admin to explicitly enable IMAP if employees want to access their corporate email with a client).

Google benefit massively from people not using IMAP clients and being forced into their product UIs.

That said, I wouldn't call it dead in the water for this reason. Google's tactics here have reduced the overall usage of IMAP clients, but they also serve as strong motivation for that small niche of users to move away from Gmail.

But someone can write a proxy that exposes Gmail as a JMAP endpoint?

There already is one, written by the people behind JMAP even, with a public demo instance at https://proxy.jmap.io/ (don't use the demo with your own credentials of course, host it yourself)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com