this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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DeGoogle Yourself

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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] 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.