Re: [Jmap] WG Review: JSON Mail Access Protocol (jmap) - reducing configuration complexity

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Hi,

Just to add my voice to the call for easier configuration where we don’t force users to configure countless different things.  Trying to setup a new device for use with open protocols is a complete nightmare - you end up needing to configure 2 things for mail (IMAP and SMTP) plus something for Contacts (CardDAV - perhaps LDAP as well) plus something for Calendar (CalDAV).  Many users, myself included are also at the mercy of frequent forced password changes, which necessitate modifying the configuration of each of these on each device.  Bizarrely, I suspect across 99% odd of use cases, this separation is completely artificial as the same password is used on the server for all services (and cannot be different because most servers regard them as all relating to the same account).  This configuration complexity must waste countless hours across the world and is a major reason why businesses welcome ActiveSync - just to solve this one huge problem with the open protocol landscape. There may be some good esoteric academic reasons why keeping IMAP and message submission protocols separate but I think the real world has clearly showed that the added complexity is too expensive.

I believe JMAP is intending to extend from just Mail to encompass Calendar and Contacts too and I truly hope it will (in a way that doesn’t require servers to offer everything)

Folks at Calconnect and the IETF have been working on https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-aggregated-service-discovery-03 which attempts to ease the configuration burden but that looks like being a long process and needs buy in from device vendors to be really successful.  I see most of the need behind this work as a sticky plaster trying to cover up the un-necessary mess we have created :-(

It would be nice to see config dialogs where user’s are asked for minimal information (user name, perhaps server name) and then the device discovers what is available there (Mail/Contacts/Calendar/…) and offers the user a way to select them and perhaps a choice of preferred client(s) to handle each service.  The way Android handles some things, where a single bit of software is responsible for server access and perhaps local caching and other clients can provide UIs to access this is kind of neat too.

Regards,
Gren Elliot
Zimbra Software Engineer at Synacor

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