JSON Mail Access Protocol
charter-ietf-jmap-00-03

The information below is for an older proposed charter
Document Proposed charter JSON Mail Access Protocol WG (jmap) Snapshot
Title JSON Mail Access Protocol
Last updated 2017-01-06
State Draft Charter Rechartering
WG State Proposed
IESG Responsible AD Murray Kucherawy
Charter edit AD Alexey Melnikov
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-jmap-00-03

Many companies and projects are developing their own JSON based
representations of email which are proprietary, non-standard, and
incompatible with each other. These protocols are proliferating due
to existing standards being insufficient or poorly suited to the
environments they are operating in, particularly mobile and webmail.

The JMAP working group will specify an mechanism to allow clients to
both view and send email from a server over a single stateless HTTPS
channel with minimal round trips. The protocol will support
out-of-band signaling of changes, and will give mobile clients
benefits in terms of battery life and network usage.

The use of multiple protocols to perform actions within a single
application creates significant support challenges, as users may get a
variety of partial failure modes (for example, can receive email, but
can not send new messages). This is further exacerbated if the
different protocols are authenticated separately.

The work of this group is limited to developing a protocol for a client
synchronising data with a server. The work will be based on draft-jenkins-jmap
and draft-jenkins-jmapmail. Any server-to-server issues or
end-to-end encryption of messages are out of scope for this working
group.

The working group will coordinate with the Security Area on credential
management and authentication.

Input to working group discussions shall include:

The working group will deliver the following:

  • A problem statement detailing the deployment environment and
    situations that motivate work on a new protocol for client to
    server email synchronisation. The working group may choose
    not to publish this as an RFC.

  • A document describing an extensible protocol and data structures which
    supports stateless use, flood control and batched operations.

  • A document describing how to use the extensible protocol over HTTPS
    with the data structures expressed as JSON.

  • A document describing a data model for email viewing, management,
    searching, and submission on top of the extensible protocol.

  • An executable test suite and documented test cases to assist
    developers of JMAP servers to ensure they conform to the
    specifications.