JSON Mail Access Protocol
charter-ietf-jmap-00-12

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 2017-03-06
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-00-12

A number of JSON-based email access protocols 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
cannot 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, which also
supports IMAP extensions specified below. The JMAP data model needs
to remain backwards compatible with the IMAP mailstore model (where a
message is always associated with a single mailbox), but it might
support other underlying models (e.g. Gmail-style labels).

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) "Email submission by placing into designated outbox mailbox" will
take into consideration extensive IMAPEXT mailing list discussions
on message submission through IMAP.

4) 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.

5) 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.

6) 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.
Note that consensus is required both for changes to the current protocol
mechanisms and retention of current mechanisms. In particular, because
something is in the initial document set does not imply that there is
consensus around the feature or around how it is specified. However
gratuitous changes to proposed design should be avoided.

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.

  • 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.