FastMail's 2018 in review
 

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The other major “changing world” project in a technical sense has been completing the work of the JMAP specifications at the IETF standards organisation. JMAP is an email-client protocol which grew out of our internal protocols built for our web interface over the past eight years, and will hopefully soon be an internet standard. All development has been entirely in the open — we believe in open standards and are investing heavily in supporting and leading them. Our developers are major contributors to the Cyrus IMAP server project, and all our work there is released to the community, fully open source. Cyrus is the reference implementation of JMAP on the server, and the workhorse powering our products.

JMAP means that email clients can be made more easily, be more efficient with battery life, and provide better notifications and features. It’s a protocol for now and for the future. This year we fully rebuilt our web interface and backend on top of JMAP. This mammoth effort has meant we have shipped far fewer features than we usually would in a year, but we’ve built a really solid base for future improvements which will benefit all our users in the long run.

No advent calendar this year. I am not surprised, as it was a lot of work, but I did find the last couple of years' advent calendars interesting.