DeGoogle Yourself

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A community for those that would like to get away from Google.

Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!

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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] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you able to guarantee that your email service will still be around a year from now? Or five years from now? Or twenty?

Not trying to hate, just want to make sure before I create an account and start using your service for literally everything. If you one day decide to shut down and I lose access to my primary email address, I'm screwed.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a great question.

I can guarantee it will be around a year from now (unless California or the United States is no longer around). I have no plans to close it or stop offering the service. I’m funding it myself, and I have enough to keep it going without profit for several years (probably over five years). For now, I’m letting people on through a waitlist so I can control its growth and understand the limits of the current servers. Then I can set up automatic provisioning based on those metrics.

I’m trying to self fund it through profitability, so that the only people I have to answer to are my customers, rather than investors, who may not have the best interest of the customers in mind.

As for twenty years in the future, I would love to still be in control of it, but I can’t guarantee that. If I do sell it, one of my top priorities will be that the new owner maintain the current domain name and users. Or if I step down as CEO, I would choose a successor that shares my vision and motivations.

I’ll also be supporting custom domains in the near future, so if you join and use your own domain, then you could always transfer that to a new provider if anything does happen to the service.

I hope that answers your question well and alleviates any concerns you have.

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

This is a really thorough and useful answer. Nice one.