Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has an XMPP client. JMP’s tagline, “Freedom for SMS”, captures the freedom that JMP gives you from traditional cell phone carriers, as well as the fully-free nature of all the software that powers JMP (licensed entirely under AGPLv3+).

Today marks one year since JMP launched - at 12:29 UTC (07:29 Eastern Time) on February 15, 2017, the big switch was flipped on https://jmp.chat/ and the site (and service) went live!

When we started, JMP was a bit less featureful - it didn’t use Cheogram (some may recall the uglier catapult.sgx.soprani.ca JIDs), there was no voicemail at all (let alone transcription), and JMP didn’t support outgoing calls or have its own SIP accounts (you needed to provide an existing phone number or SIP address for receiving calls). Since then, we’ve added all these features, and much more. The porting process for bringing your existing number to JMP is streamlined now, we have a much better sense of (and recommendation list for) which XMPP servers and clients work best with JMP, and we support a range of payment options beyond PayPal now, including Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (with more to come!).

You may have noticed that after a year, JMP is still technically in beta. We want to make a few more updates to JMP before we leave beta, particularly in the area of payment options. As an example, a lot of people have asked about the limit on calling minutes that one can use in a month - we’ll be adding ways to get as many minutes as you need, along with many more (and easier) options for keeping your JMP account paid up. We hope to have all of that ready by the end of this year.

Now that you know about JMP’s distant past and future, here are some more recent updates:

• as mentioned last month, several people from JMP will be at LibrePlanet this year, including JMP’s founder (also giving a talk, “Sustainable free software: it needs your business”) - we’ll have a booth and would love to chat if you happen to be around; LibrePlanet is March 24-25 at MIT (in the Boston area): signup at https://libreplanet.org/2018/ today!
• some new commands have been added to JMP/Cheogram (you can access them as you would the Configure Calls command, per https://jmp.chat/#voicemail )
  • Reset SIP Account - if you didn’t write them down or need a refresher, you can get your SIP credentials here (for placing and receiving calls using your JMP number)
  • Display JMP Number - an easier way to see what your JMP number is, in case you forgot
  • Show Monthly Usage (not new, but worth mentioning) - see how many minutes and messages you’ve used in the past 30 days; daily and historical stats coming soon!
• as usual, a variety of bug fixes and minor improvements were added as well; for a complete list, see:
  • https://gitlab.com/ossguy/jmp-fwdcalls/commits/master
  • https://gitlab.com/ossguy/jmp-register/commits/master
  • https://gitlab.com/ossguy/sgx-catapult/commits/master

If you’d like to know what’s happening with JMP between emails like this, here are some ways you can find out:

• follow us on Twitter
• find us in xmpp:discuss@conference.soprani.ca?join - a group chat accessible from most XMPP clients, and on the web
• signup for the 30-day free trial at https://jmp.chat/#signup and try it out!

More updates on where we’re at with payment plans and future feature work will be headed your way next month. As always, we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop on all the new developments.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!