heliotrope

JMAP does indeed look very interesting. In my (very, very slow) path towards writing my own email client, I've also come to expect that a new, simpler protocol is probably a better bet than imap. Partly this belief is bolstered by the fact that the creator of sup went on to make heliotrope: https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/heliotrope [ed: I suppose the canonical repo is https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope -- but afaik they are the same (and both appear dead)] Is the code on: http://jmap.io/server.html actual code? If so what kind? Lua? It'd be great if you could publish some test cases, even if you don't have implementations to go (open source) with it at this time. I'm sure fastmail can bring a lot of real-world testing and experience to the table when/if designing a new protocol for email -- and I'd be very surprised if we actually n

You should have a peek at what my former coworker William is doing with Heliotrope. Pretty nice email client that supports threading with incredibly fast searching. It's not exactly what you're looking for and it's still pretty raw, you have to be familiar with the command line, but it has a lot of potential. https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope

Heliotrope is a personal email server. It provides all the functionality you want in a modern email client: - proper message threading - labels - fast, full-text search over all messages with a complete query language - support for signed and encrypted email - an extensible JSON-over-HTTP API Heliotrope is a backend service against which email clients / MUAs can be written. To use it, you must use a client. For an example client, see Turnsole: http://github.com/wmorgan/turnsole. WHY ANOTHER PROTOCOL? WHY NOT JUST USE IMAP? Because IMAP is terrible and you want all those features listed above. https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope

How is IMAP unreliable for backups? If you want to keep the tags, take a look at heliotrope[1], a personal email server with tag support that can sync Gmail accounts. [1]: https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope