Here’s an interesting approach that I learned of recently: Nylas, a firm which used to make the Nylas Mail client (now forked to the pleasant Open Source Mailspring client), have pivoted their business to make APIs to replace mail protocols. They have some big customers like Hubspot, who pay them to provide solid API access to IMAP and others.
Apparently firms hate those old protocols so much that they’re prepared to pay for a monthly subscription to work around them, and have just one more REST API to contend with instead of any kind of direct email interaction.
Threat to the future of email? What’s so bad about our stalwart SMTP and IMAP anyway?