DeGoogle Yourself

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I made an alternative to Gmail. (port87.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I’m Hunter Perrin, and I made a new email service called Port87.

Gmail was a great email service back in 2006, but now it just sucks. They put ads in your inbox that look like unread emails to trick you into clicking them. To me, that means Gmail is malware.

I’ve been degoogling my life for the past 7 years, and Gmail is the last Google service I depended on. I love ProtonMail and use it too, but I developed a new way to sort email automatically, and wanted to write my own service based on it.

Port87 lets you use a tagged address like [email protected], and that automically creates a “netflix” label and puts all email to that address in it. This helps keep your email organized automatically, and protects against spam and phishing.

The database abstraction library I wrote for Port87 is called Nymph.js, and it’s open source. Also the UI library I wrote is called Svelte Material UI, and it’s open source too.

I hope you all like it, and hopefully it can help migrate away from Gmail.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

what is the business model for this service?

i couldnt find a privacy policy.

Sorting emails like this is really useful.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Here’s the privacy policy:

https://port87.com/privacy-policy

You get 500MB free storage, and you can receive unlimited email. Here’s the breakdown of subscriptions:

$0.99/month to send unlimited messages.
$1.99/month for 2GB
$5.99/month for 10GB
$9.99/month for 20GB
$19.99/month for 100GB
$39.99/month for 1TB

I’m working on a mobile app that will be free. For now, the web app is a progressive web app, so you can install that to your home screen and it works like a mobile app.

I’m also working on other features that aren’t ready yet, but they’ll be premium features:

IMAP, SMTP, and CardDAV support.
Custom domain support.
Additional users for your custom domain.

So basically the business model is pretty similar to other email services. One difference is that I charge for sending mail, and basically that’s to prevent spam. Spammers are unlikely to use a real payment account, because it will get shut down when they’re caught spamming.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the informative answer.

The business model seems to be subscription based which i like(decently priced imo).

i suggest you looking into supporting external mail clients like k9/fairemail. Emails being encrypted at rest would be big.(People like to keep their stuff private even from the provider). Having a web app is nice tho.

i hope your ventures into this become succesful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Thank you. :)

Once I have IMAP working, third party clients like those will work. IMAP will also let you export and import emails.

One of my goals is ease of use (particularly to support enterprise users), and storing emails encrypted complicates things. (You need a bridge for IMAP, and you need to index all emails on the client side to support full text search.) I will support S/MIME and OpenPGP over IMAP though, so with the right setup, emails could be end-to-end encrypted.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why do you think you need a mobile app when there's already a ton of free email clients for mobile?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’m going to support IMAP too, but IMAP doesn’t fully support the way Port87 works, so the mobile app will probably be the better experience for most people.

Labels in Port87 have the following options:

Get push notifications about new mail that comes to this label.
Show the mail from this label in the aggbox.
Mark incoming mail to this label as read.
If the sender is new, screen (hold) their emails until they pass a simple challenge to make sure they're human.
Include this label in the list of addresses sent to people when they try to mail your bare address.

In the app, I can present these as toggles, but there isn’t a way to do that in IMAP.

IMAP also isn’t aware of an address being mapped to a label, so in the app when you hit reply or compose, it will use the address of the label as the From address. In IMAP/SMTP, you’ll have to adjust that yourself every time.

So basically, I’m going to try to make using a third party app the best experience I can, but there are limitations at the protocol level that will be very difficult to work around.