UseCase: Snooze Mails

[guettli]

Hi,

I like the snooze feature of gmail. This way I can focus on the current mails.

Does JMAP enable such a feature?

[neilj]

This is not in the current JMAP specs, but could be standardised in an extension. Fastmail has already implemented a custom extension to add this to JMAP; we would be interested in standardising this if other mailbox providers want to get involved. The difficulty will be in the differences in exact semantics of how Snooze works between different platforms. It may not be possible to come up with a standard that multiple providers are willing to implement exactly.

[guettli]

@neilj thank you for being open. I am not familiar with the process. How to create an extension to the JMAP spec?

[neilj]

You would propose an extension to the JMAP WG at the IETF. More info on how to participate in the IETF can be found at https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/

[CanRau]

Stumbled upon https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-extra-email-snooze-00.html#name-jmap-mail-snooze-extension

[jfly]

It looks like https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-extra-email-snooze/history/ ended up getting closed with the following message:

We are not planning to continue with this - there are too may different ways things get snoozed (at IETF119)

@brong are you able to shed any insight on this? I'm curious what the different ways are that things get snoozed. Is there any hope for getting a snooze standard? Is there anything community members like myself can do to help?

Fastmail has already implemented a custom extension to add this to JMAP

Out of curiosity, has Fastmail documented the JMAP extension they use for email snoozing? I see "draft-ietf-extra-sieve-snooze" mentioned on https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/rfc-support.html. Does that mean it's a version of that now-closed rfc?

[rjbs]

@jfly Hi, I'm not Bron, but I can answer this.

When snoozed, is a message still visible? Is it in the same mailbox it started in, or elsewhere? Can other clients see that mailbox? Can they move mail in and out?

When it awakens, does it go to inbox? Does its INTERNALDATE change? Can it go back to another mailbox? If it's JMAP, can it go to multiple mailboxes? Who controls that?

The issue at IETF 119 was that there was not sufficient interest in the production of any interoperating implementations. Servers that already implement it don't want to change. Clients that implement it client-side would like it to happen server-side, but it likely won't be the same behavior, so they're not keen to change what users get based on a tiny fraction of servers supporting something.

Fastmail's snooze feature still might get published as a JMAP extension. The draft you cite is related, but not it. That's about adding a Sieve action for snoozing, which is tied up with the same issues: what does snoozing do, interoperably?

The Fastmail version puts a message into the Snoozed mailbox (mailbox with role snoozed) and sets a custom property whose value is an object with three properties: until, moveToMailboxId, and setKeywords. Those second two properties are "what happens when it awakens". This spec might change if or when we decide to make it publicly available.