Open standards, all the way down.

WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger — almost every way people message each other today is owned by a single company. Email isn't. You choose your provider, your client, and your domain, and you can pack up your entire archive and move it somewhere else.

The same capture is now underway one layer up. Assistants that only talk to their own company's services are the new proprietary messengers, and the fight has two fronts: the action layer, where incumbents happily open up because it helps them ship agents faster, and the data layer — the right to take your mail and leave — which they will not open voluntarily. That second layer is the one we defend.

So every layer of Langmail is an open standard anyone can implement. JMAP (RFC 8620), the next-generation sync protocol, at the data layer. CalDAV for calendars. IMAP and SMTP for interoperability with everything that came before. MCP so any agent — not just ours — can operate your account. OAuth 2.1 so it does that with its own scoped credential, never your password. Where a standard exists, we implement it; where we're tempted to invent a proprietary one, we don't.

We didn't build a mail server from scratch. Langmail builds on proven open-source infrastructure and runs it — tuned, hardened, on our own servers. When something in that ecosystem breaks, we debug it down to the root cause and report the diagnosis upstream, so the fix helps everyone, not just us.

And it goes both ways. We're opening up our own platform piece by piece, starting with the parts most useful to people who want to run their own stack — with the goal of making Langmail open source.