What

COI is a free & open standard built on top of the IMAP and SMTP standards. The COI ecosystem is made up of the COI Standard plus the compatible Client Apps and Email Servers. COI works with all email servers, but IMAP servers can be enhanced with extra COI capabilities. These extra capabilities make the development of both services and applications much easier and more powerful.

Why

Email is the most ubiquitous messaging system in the world with far more active users than any other competing messaging service (7 billion accounts from around 3.8 billion active users).

Email is open & free: anyone can use it and implement messaging apps and services for it.

Email is federated & permission-less: you can plug in your email services and don’t need to ask anyone for permission. You can even host your own private email servers.

Email is trustable: choose your preferred provider and app freely, don’t be restricted to one single provider and solution.

How

COI consists of a client-side standard and a server-side standard. As a developer, you can create apps, bots or any other services based on these standards – using the programming language, OS and environment of your choice.