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.
Looks pretty great and I applaud the efforts. We need more services like this in the space! Pricing is hard but purelymail.com pricing really makes sense and works for me. You pay based on how much you use it and it lets you add unlimited domains. I’m sure it’s not a great fit for everyone but for light users the pricing is wonderful. If you come up with something similar I’d try your service.
Unfortunately, that’s way cheaper than I’d be able to go. If I were just running standard open source servers, it would be easier to hit that price point, but I had to write my own server and client software to make it work the way it does. It’s mostly that ongoing development cost that keeps me from offering lower prices. I’ve tried to stay competitive as best I can.
I’m also trying to run the entire thing without any outside investment, so I can’t subsidize the cost with VC funding, which is the only other way I’d be able to hit that price point. As of right now, I have zero outside investment, and I’m not currently planning on taking any.
From my perspective, no VC investment is a huge plus.
Really impressive to roll your own mail servers and clients! Do you use AI much to help with development?
None at all. For a few reasons:
AFAICT, every AI has been trained on at least some of my code, and some of them will spit out my own code nearly verbatim if I ask them in a certain way, so I 100% know that the copyright issue makes it a no-go even if the quality problems are solved.
You can see for yourself if you ask them to generate an example of using a Svelte Material UI button. They’ll give you code that looks nearly identical to my examples available on https://sveltematerialui.com/