FastMail at the openSUSE conference and Kolab Summit

I was fortunate enough to recently attend – and speak – at both the 2015 openSUSE Conference and Kolab Summit in The Hague.

As one of the team working on the open source Cyrus email technology, this was a great opportunity to meet with fellow developers and email administrators. Initially developed by Carnegie Mellon University, the Cyrus server has always been freely available as open source software.  It has been at the core of FastMail’s service since we started, and is also an important component of Kolab’s groupware.

The Cyrus project is a great collaborative team including staff from Carnegie Mellon University, Kolab, Netmail, OpenIO and of course FastMail plus awesome volunteers from all around the globe. We’re committed to keeping Cyrus entirely open source, and welcome new contributors – both volunteers and companies offering staff time for development and integration. Contact us on our mailing lists (cyrus and jmap) if you want to help!

Even though we are competitors to a certain degree, FastMail shares many values with Kolab – building great software, providing the best experience to our users, and giving back to the community. I was asked during the Advent Calendar blog post series last year if we were giving away too much of our “secret sauce” – my answer was that there’s nothing super-secret about running a good email service, just a ton of hard work. To underline our cooperation, FastMail assisted the Kolab conference as a key sponsor.

My first talk focused on the history of Cyrus up until now and our plans for the future, starting with a major new release at OSCON in Portland on July 21st of this year.

My second talk at the openSUSE conference was about the JMAP protocol, and the foundation that we are forming to support the open source development project (video available). While preparing the talk, I snipped out the two video clips from the video at jmap.io. I realised that they are even more powerful in isolation, showing just how fast email can be with a protocol designed from the ground up for speed and efficiency.

Server side pre-calculation plus intelligent use of SSDs.

Instant sync including messages, counts and entire mailbox state in a single update with push technology.

So I included both clips in my talk! By this stage I also knew what the major announcement of the conferences was going to be. Roundcube, the most popular open-source web email client, is starting a project to update their code.  They are running a crowdfunding push to fund development.  I’ve already pitched in personally!  FastMail is also going to assist with both funding and code contribution.

Looking to the future, we want Cyrus to be usable and scalable beyond simple systems. And while open source software is absolutely essential to the future of the software industry, for it to truly succeed it needs great products to be developed. Our ultimate goal is to make Cyrus a great product to install and run, with a protocol which allows brilliant clients to be developed.

Which leads neatly to JMAP. JMAP has been developed as a replacement for existing protocols such as IMAP, SMTP Submission, CalDAV and CardDAV. The JMAP protocol is totally open and unencumbered and leverages existing standards like HTTP, JSON and native push channels, making it easier for developers to work with, so much so that Roundcube are planning to use it as the core of their new client/server protocol. In short, JMAP and Cyrus together are a great combination - a fully open and very efficient server with a fully open and very efficient protocol!

With openSUSE and the Kolab Summit being held together, it was great to meet and share ideas with so many other people working in the same space. I also saw a ton of interesting talks and even snuck upstairs and joined a BodyPump class (the conferences were held in a fitness centre) I also got a chance to travel for a few days after the conference and meet some other companies working in the email space, as well as inspect our new Amsterdam datacentre (we’ll talk more about this in a later blog post).

I’m really excited about the future of email, and looking forward to building it together. Feel free to join the mailing lists for cyrus and jmap and get involved!