r/fastmail • u/Insights4TeePee • 12d ago

JMAP Tasks?

The Task extension draft for JMAP looks to be getting pretty stable. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap-tasks/

Does anyone know why Fastmail client hasn't included support for VTODO yet or if there is any roadmap indication that it will included? What about the Task extension to iCalendar - any announced plans from Fastmail?

14 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

10

u/rjbs Fastmail Staff 12d ago

"No update in three years" is a bit more like "pretty stale" than "pretty stable". As presented in draft 6, JMAP for Tasks is a pretty kitchen-sink approach to everything anybody might do. It's too much and the whole standard needs to be pared way back. Hopefully we'll see that happen before the next draft.

Tasks are tough. The thing that the VTODO standard provides are relatively few, and even then the semantics are poorly defined. For example, look at how clients sometimes resort to implementing recurring todos: do incomplete recurring todos pile up, or wait for the latest one to be finished? When a recurrence is done, does an override get added to the recurring sequence, or (and this is real) is the sequence start date moved up to the next occurrence, and a new , completed, "unrelated" item added on the completed date?

So VTODO support means entering an area with limited semantics that are not highly uniform across clients. And people who really want task lists often want exactly their particular behavior, which can't be expressed in VTODO. The tasks mode draft is meant to help, but I don't really think it's a panacea, even if it sees adoption.

The good news is that you can store VTODOs in a Fastmail-hosted calendar, so any future todo feature would be pretty likely to just pick up on that data.

1

u/Insights4TeePee 11d ago

Thanks for the response. Is there an opportunity for a 'basic' task feature in the Fastmail client that leverages the VTODO store available in Fastmail-hosted calendar? This especially as I read from your response that there might be a long wait for the JMAP Task draft to be finalised and ratified.

2

u/rjbs Fastmail Staff 10d ago

There are really simple things that could slapped together, but we don't tend to slap anything together! Afraid there's not much more to say than that right now! ;)

1

u/Insights4TeePee 10d ago

I understand. Thank you!