JSON Mail Access Protocol
charter-ietf-jmap-00-09

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 2017-02-15
State External Review (Message to Community, Selected by Secretariat) Rechartering
WG State Proposed
IESG Responsible AD Murray Kucherawy
Charter edit AD Alexey Melnikov
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-jmap-00-09

A number of JSON-based representations of email have been developed
that 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 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.

JMAP specifies the interactions between email clients and mail
stores, providing an alternative to IMAP and SMTP submission.
The JMAP working group will specify a mechanism to allow clients to
both view and send email from a server over a single HTTPS
channel with minimal round trips. A single protocol for receipt and
submission will resolve long-standing difficulties users face
setting up clients to talk to servers.

The protocol will support
push notification of changes using the mechanism defined in RFC 8030.
This will give mobile clients benefits in terms of battery life and
network usage. It will also support push notifications via server-sent
events (https://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/) for direct connection to
clients that can support persistent TCP connections.

Work on JMAP will be bound by the following constraints:

1) The protocol will operate on RFC 5322/MIME (RFC 2045-2047, etc)
message objects or information extracted from them.

2) JMAP needs to be implementable on top of an IMAP server, using
IMAP extensions specified below. The Working Group will discuss and
document how a single server or proxy implementation can implement
both IMAP and JMAP at the same time.

3) The work of this group is limited to developing a protocol for a client
synchronising data with a server. Any server-to-server issues are
out of scope for this working group.

4) New end-to-end encryption mechanisms are out of scope, but the work should
consider how to integrate with existing standards such as S/MIME and OpenPGP.

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

The work will be based on draft-jenkins-jmap and draft-jenkins-jmapmail.
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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, with
    support for flood control and batched operations, and operating over HTTPS.

  • 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.

  • A document describing how JMAP to IMAP/SUBMIT proxies can be implemented.
    Among different considerations, the document will cover security considerations
    involved in operating such a proxy.

  • A document describing how a dual IMAP and JMAP server implementation
    can be done. This can be combined with the above document, if that makes sense.

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