If you’re looking for an alternative to Gmail, may I introduce Port87.
I’ve been working on this email service for four years, and I just opened it to the public today. The way it works is a might different than other email services.
You still get an address like yourname@port87.com, but you don’t usually use that form. Instead, you add a label like yourname-lemmy@port87.com. This is often called subaddressing or plus addressing. With Port87, these addresses go into labels. Everything between the dash and the at is a label. When you sign up somewhere, you can give them a label, even if it doesn’t exist yet. Then it becomes a pending label that you can approve to move it in with all your other labels. This really helps with organization too.
You can also give labels meant for real people, like yourname-friends@port87.com. On labels meant for real people, you can enable screening that responds to anyone new with a link to prove they’re human. When they click the link, their email is delivered.
Lastly, you can give out your “bare address” (yourname@port87.com) anywhere, because any email to it doesn’t get delivered to you. Instead, they get a response saying to email one of your other addresses, then a list of all of the addresses to your public labels. For example, I have a public label at hperrin-opensource@port87.com that’s meant for email about my open source projects. That gets included in the list in the auto reply when you email hperrin@port87.com.
Oh, also, you can bring your own domain! The main benefit of your own domain is it prevents vendor lock in. If Port87 ever stops meeting your needs, you can pack up your domain and take it to another provider. It also prevents losing your address if Port87 ever shuts down.
If you can’t tell, I’m very passionate about email, and the more competition there is to Gmail and Exchange, the more they’ll be forced to actually stop trying to Embrace Extend Extinguish email.
soo… what’s stopping spammer mcspammer to send emails to hperrin-friendo@port87.com and thusly hitting your eyeballs? or spam you with millions of new tags by adding random junk to the hyphenated part?
The screening on the friends label would stop them from emailing that one. Any other labels would just become pending labels. If you’re not expecting a new label, there’s little reason to check your pending labels anyway, so you probably wouldn’t notice them. They get deleted after 60 days if you haven’t approved them.
There’s nothing stopping an actual human being spammer with a real email address from reaching you, but that’s kind of the point. Real people with real addresses can reach you. Automated spam has a much harder time reaching you. They’d have to have a custom system designed to target Port87. Even then, I could just add something like Cloudflare Turnstile to the screening process.
Spammers don’t typically like to use real email addresses with a real return path because they get shut down quickly.