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hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 week agoI developed my own email server and client over 4 years. My R&D cost was about $250,000, and that resulted in email unlike any other service. I can guarantee it’s unlike any other service, because it’s patented. It does not use an off-the-shelf email server, mostly because there are no off-the-shelf email servers that work the way Port87 does.
Even still, I tried to price my services at a fair markup from what it actually costs me to run it.
So if all you want is just basic email with standard features, yeah, you can get it cheaper elsewhere. You can even just set up Postfix, Dovecot, and Roundcube at home. But you get something different with Port87.
the_artic_one@piefed.social 1 week ago
But what’s supposed to make a potential customer excited about that? Looking at your page, all I see is what you call labels, extensions to your email address separated by a “-” which seem identical to the “+” addressing supported by most big email services except that you automatically set up rules to bounce emails sent to the home label instead of the user needing to manually set that up.
Maybe this works some clever way under the hood but nothing on your site really tells me why I should be interested or excited about it. Every email provider advertises that they have some “unique” solution to spam and most of these work well enough for most people so you need more than just that to have a good selling proposition when you’re not priced competitively.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
I’ll try to go into more detail than the home page.
You don’t use your “bare” address with Port87. Every place you give your address to gets its own address. Yes, this is accomplished through subaddressing (aka plus addressing). When you give a new subaddress, it creates the label for you (you can also create a label yourself, which creates a new subaddress). All email to that subaddress goes to that label, no matter if their from address changes. When one is created for you, it’s created as “pending”, so if you’re not expecting one, it won’t bug you. The label has toggles for things like “mark as read” and “get notifications”. It also has one for “public label”. That means it’s included in the reply when someone emails your bare address.
It also has one for “screen senders”. This one is important, because it separates labels meant for real people from labels meant for automated emails. When someone first emails a label with screening, it’ll email them back asking them to prove they’re human (right now, that’s just clicking a link). Only once they do that is their email actually delivered to you (it’ll be in a screening section in your account before that).
So you can have one account that’s meant for both emailing real people and getting email from automated senders (accounts, newsletters, etc). All of these emails come in to your account already organized. Really, all of them. You don’t need to manage filters before they do. If the system accepts them, it means they’re in the right spot. Therefore, Port87 doesn’t have an inbox. That’s one thing that really did require me to write my own server. Every off the shelf server has to have an inbox. They get very upset if you delete the inbox. xD
Then there’s also the search language. This takes a lot to explain, but it’s basically as powerful as a SQL query. Right now, it’s only used for searching, but I’m going to be working on using it for other things shortly. Here’s a page that explains how it works:
port87.help/en/using-search
(It’s more powerful than the Sieve script matchers, but you can’t use it for scripting yet. I’m working on that.)
The reason I say on the home page that it’s “a new kind of email” is because it really is different than other email systems. I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining to people how it works because they always try to think of it in terms of “how does this all map to something like Gmail”, when really it just doesn’t. And that was kind of my point with the original statement about marketing. People have very rigid expectations of how email works, and when you step outside of those, it becomes very difficult to explain.