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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

To the contrary it will be very good for innovation because it means people will build extensions for other email providers such as Fastmail.

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No. If you want, build an email app with features or with it's own plugins. Not extensions around closed, single point of failure services.

Does Fastmail even provide an API like this?

Sure, IMAP, POP, CALDav, same as all the other mail providers...

And the optimized JMAP protocol too.

The fact that I am getting voted down proves how absolute the groupthink is... If you work in Google's ecosystem, however, the only possible exit is being bought by Google... Get bought by a competitor and they'll just turn you off.

So the answer is no then, because Gmail still provides imap and pop, which are unaffected by this.

But how does the credential management work?

I don't recall since the last time I set it up was a while ago, but I think just your password + an app specific code if you use 2fa normally. But yeah I'm pretty confident this doesn't apply to outlook.

So why don't we see more startups use open protocols for access to email rather than make things that are GMail specific?

Why do you get voted down for just suggesting that they do so?

I'm not sure, my expectation would be because oauth is more secure and feature rich than either imap or pop. Jmap I'm less familiar with.

IMAP can be awkward with sync, pagination and has never played great with labels vs folders. JMAP looks promising.

Both disabled by default (ridiculous for an email provider), and if you enable 2FA get ready to do some yak shaving.

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