Subject: [Jmap] MIME vs message+attachment

From: Roderick Kennedy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 18:53:39 +0000

Reading the JMAP spec, one thing that jumped out at me was the 
simplification of the MIME structure towards something more like what we 
see in client front ends: HTML and plaintext message versions, plus 
attachments. Is there any potential for some common ground that would 
retrieve the MIME structure, but in a JSON-friendly format?

Apologies if I've misunderstood the spec.

-- 
Roderick Kennedy

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From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 21:42:06 +0100

Why? What is the use case?

Arnt

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From: Roderick Kennedy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 21:11:34 +0000

In general, clients that deal with something other than human-to-human 
text messages, but things that should not necessarily be considered 
simple attachments to human-readable text.

It struck me when I first started IMAP/SMTP development that in the MIME 
design, it's only by convention that all emails even have human-readable 
text parts. So it seemed that the original intention was more broad than 
the text-attachment paradigm. ICS invitations are one example - some 
clients treat them as attachments, others handle them in their own right 
to connect to calendaring apps. I think one can distinguish between 
attachments (files that will usually be saved to disk or opened in an 
app) and more general MIME parts (data packets carrying some other 
meaning). And to allow that distinction might prove valuable in the 
future and allow for extensibility in terms of what email can support as 
a platform.

But I do understand if this sort of thing is outside of JMAP's intended 
scope.

On 25/01/2017 20:42, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Jmap mailing list
> [email-masked]
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-- 
Roderick Kennedy
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From: Neil Jenkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2017 12:26:45 +1100

On Thu, 26 Jan 2017, at 08:11 AM, Roderick Kennedy wrote:

>  ICS invitations are one example - some clients treat them as
>  attachments, others handle them in their own right to connect to
>  calendaring apps.

ICS files would appear as "attachments" in the current JMAP message
model. However, there is certainly benefit to the client if the server
can parse the iCalendar and make the data more easily accessible. The
way to do this would be with an extra property on the Message object
giving the parsed representation (e.g."attachedEvents"), just like the
"attachedMessages" property gives a parsed representation of an attached
email (which also appears in the "attachments" list). I omitted this
from the initial draft, as I'm waiting on the CalConnect work to finish
standardising a JSON event format so this can be used.

Neil.