FastMail supports Roundcube Next development

FastMail have always been a strong supporter of open source and open standards. We retain customers by providing an excellent, reliable service which is great value for money — not by locking them into our platform.

At The Kolab Summit we had an opportunity to meet like-minded developers from the Roundcube project, the most popular open source webmail client in the world.

FastMail is already investing heavily in open source email with our server-side work on Cyrus IMAPd, currently employing three developers, a writer, and a tester for the project.

We have also been preparing the fully open JMAP protocol to replace our current custom web API, with another two developers working on JMAP client and server code.

To safeguard a future where protocols are open, and interoperability doesn’t mean speaking both the protocol of Vendor A and of Vendor B, the world needs freely available, modern email software. We believe the Roundcube team are the right people to build one of those clients. We are helping them by offering code for the data model from our own incredibly fast (video) web interface, assistance with JMAP compatibility, and a contribution of
US $10,000 towards the Roundcube Next Indiegogo campaign.

If you care about open email/contacts/calendaring software and protocols, we encourage you to support their campaign as well.

We are also assisting the Thunderbird project and their Summer of Code student Suyash to add JMAP support to Thunderbird, the world’s most popular open source desktop client.

You can follow JMAP progress by reading the discussion group and join in with testing, documentation, or development.

The future of open source email, calendar and contacts has never looked brighter! Here’s to great collaboration this year.