GRgrinich·Dec 23, 2014
Michael from Inbox here— a few key differences, from the horse’s mouth. :)
First of all— I want to say that we’re huge fans of Fastmail and really admire their team and focus. Rob and Neil actually came by for lunch this summer and hacked in our office for the day. We’ve discussed JMAP back and forth with them for a while, and specifically had a long thread when we added calendar endpoints to the Inbox platform. [1]
The fundamental differences between the Inbox APIs and JMAP are the kinds of applications built with them, the open source code, and the email providers supported.
The Inbox APIs are really designed to let developers access email data in non-traditional ways. Our site reads “Say goodbye to IMAP” but we’re not so much replacing IMAP, as creating a new protocol which liberates email data to a higher form. We think about email as
Read the rest
“the database of your life” which means unconventional “clients” and access/manipulation patterns.
That’s one of the reasons we have a more REST-inspired design, whereas JMAP is closer to RPC. The Inbox API endpoints strive to represent canonical objects that developers simply treat as resources. JMAP is tailored specifically for traditional email clients, so it excels at fast operations (like archive -> reload), but compromises in other areas of simplicity and clarity IMHO.
The other main difference is code. The Inbox sync engine is open source with about 15k lines of code on GitHub.[2] You can run it yourself right now, and it works on all providers, including Fastmail! That means your users don’t need to be on any specific provider or backend. If you don’t want to run it yourself, you can use our hosted version which also includes support for enterprise environments that use Microsoft Exchange. [3]
I’ve been lurking on the IETF mailing lists for several years now, and one thing I learned is that spec documents hardly move the world forward. Developers need code that is battle tested and they can depend on. What use is a API spec if you can’t build an app with it?
The JMAP system is a great spec for FastMail’s internal mail service, and it works to power their own clients, but unless they make some drastic changes to the code and business, it’s not a platform for building 3rd party mail apps.
As an aside, I totally wish I had more time to write. I envy how prolific the Fastmail blog is these days. :) Keep up the great work Bron, Rob, Neil, and the rest!
[0] https://www.inboxapp.com
[1] https://www.inboxapp.com/docs/api#calendar
[2] https://github.com/inboxapp/inbox
[3] https://www.inboxapp.com/features