Want to know more about overall scope of this project and roadmap

[joolsr]

Hi

As a JMAP web client it's very impressive, far better than other Open Source webmail solutions out there. SOGo is also good, but it's only IMAP, and doesn't make the most of the real benefits of JMAP. It's a shame that you had to fork from the original project jmap-webmail, but you're certainly putting some effort into this, the website is great too !

However, a couple of questions:-

1. As this app is quite young, what are your bigger plans for it? Do you want to create a GMail competitor with Stalwart, or are you thinking more a small scale app? What's your longer term plans for Bulwark? I ask as we're interested in using it in our company of approx 250 users and growing, alongside Stalwart. But perhaps we need a bit more certainty as to the dev plans you have for this.
2. Do you have a Roadmap? Although 95% of what we would like to see is already here there's a few small omissions. No tables in email composer is one? I will be reporting bugs that we find, and so far we are impressed ;-) Hopefully we can also with code, although I don't code myself.

Thanks

[chrilep]

I want to use it in productive environments alongside Stalwart too. I will work on this until the end. Bulwark's focus is to offer 100% of Stalwarts features and add other communication related things via plug-in system. Eg. chat and video conferencing. Those features usually need additional backends. Therefore not part of Bulwark's basic feature set.

@rathlinus forked and then turned it into a separate project because the original repo was inactive for about two weeks and we barely need a good jmap client.

When the webclient is ready we are thinking of forging an app for mobiles using flutter. This is not finally discussed. Just to give you an idea what this is aiming for.

[rathlinus]

Hi joolsr,

It’s great to hear that Bulwark is hitting the mark for you, especially compared to existing IMAP-based solutions.

Regarding your questions and the future of the project:

Project Scope & Status

Current State: I am a student developing this in my free time. To be honest, I didn't expect the project to "blow up" this quickly! While I’m fully committed to working on this until the end, I’m not yet sure at what point I might get overwhelmed by the scale of it.

The Fork: As @chrilep mentioned, the fork was necessary because the original repository was inactive for several weeks. To move at the pace I need and maintain control over the development process, I couldn't wait indefinitely for PR approvals.

Commercial Intent: I am not planning to turn this into a commercial or managed mail server provider. There are other companies better suited for that. My focus remains on the software itself.

Roadmap & Corporate Use

Roadmap: There isn’t a formal, "official" roadmap just yet. The immediate goal is reaching 100% feature parity with Stalwart and implementing a plugin system for things like chat and video conferencing.

Support: If you plan to deploy this for a company, please keep in mind this is a community effort. If used commercially, contributions. Whether through code, debugging, or fixing issues would be greatly appreciated to help sustain the project.

Feature Requests: Please do create issues for missing features (like tables in the composer) or bugs you find. It helps me prioritize what the community actually needs.

Future

Beyond the web client, we are experimenting with a mobile app using React Native, though this is still in the early stages.

Lg
Linus Rath

[joolsr]

Hi Both for your answers.

I'm enthused by what you say, and yes, its taking off quite quickly, looks like there is a need. I do appreciate that an app like this may potentially need more help with down the line, but hopefully it can be tackled in a sensible manner. Certainly we're happy to raise bug reports, (I've already raised one and will raise more too to assist) and hopefully fix code if I can get some of our devs to chip in.
We have our own Matrix server that we run, so maybe or maybe not , a plugin for this would be useful. Certainly I can see the benefit of plugins, but also as yet I would say there are still a few little bugs that do need fixing up sooner rather than later..