#port87 — Public Fediverse posts

There is a secret hidden trans theme in #Port87 Mail. I’ve never disclosed it publicly, but for #transdayofvisibity I’m going to. You can activate it by going into your settings on desktop, opening the theme dropdown, then typing “traaaaaaaaaaaaaa” (I don’t remember how many As there are). There are other secret themes, that maybe I’ll disclose later. For now, enjoy pink, white, and blue #email. The best color theme! :)

Migrating Away from GitHub

After 17 years on GitHub, I have made the difficult decision to migrate from GitHub to a SciActive hosted instance of Forgejo.

It’s not exactly a secret that GitHub has been having a rough time, recently. More importantly, GitHub seems to be playing a bit fast and loose with its users’ data, with regard to AI. These things have concerned me enough that I strongly feel it’s time to move away from GitHub. I am proud of the software that I write, and it’s all written by humans, without the help of AI. Port87 has a strong stance against the use of AI in email and software development.

SciActive software will now be hosted and developed on a custom instance of Forgejo at https://forge.sciactive.com.

We have already migrated all of the Port87 code and infrastructure (these are private repositories, so they are not visible to the public). We will be migrating our remaining repositories slowly over the next several months. The open source repositories will remain on GitHub as mirrors, but issue tracking and pull requests will all be handled on the SciActive Forge. We have configured our forge to allow users to log in with both a GitHub and a GitLab account, which should allow us to remain accessible to the open source community we have served for over a decade.

This move allows us to maintain full control over even more of our infrastructure. At this point, we have very few outside services that we rely on, which allows us to remain online even when large service providers experience outages. This also helps us better maintain our users privacy. Having confidential information (like production SSH keys and environment configuration files) remain only on our on-premise servers allows us to ensure that information, along with our users’ personal information, remains private.

GitHub has been a wonderful provider, and I don’t want this announcement to be perceived as me throwing any shade toward them. I still think GitHub is a great company, I just personally disagree with the direction they have decided to pursue. Thank you to everyone at GitHub for the work you do.

I've been thinking about how to word this correctly for a while. #Port87 #Email does not use #AI, and we have no plans to.

The reasons for this decision are laid out in the article, but basically I don't think that email is an appropriate place for AI, even if it's somewhat useful. It introduces too big of a security risk to justify what little it can offer.

https://sciactive.com/2026/01/21/our-stance-on-ai-in-email/

Our Stance on AI in Email

Port87 does not use your email to train AI. Port87 also does not use AI to read your email. We do not use AI in the development of Port87. Port87’s code is written by real people, and much of it is open source.

We do not use AI for a number of reasons:

• Training AI on private email content can leak private information. It is possible to craft a prompt to retrieve verbatim copies of real emails used to train them.
• Using AI to read email can introduce security vulnerabilities. Agentic AI can be targeted using a technique called “prompt injection” to divulge private information to malicious third parties.
• AI is prone to hallucinations and inaccurate results.
• AI generated code is unreliable, unmaintainable, and prone to security vulnerabilities.
• AI generated code may infringe on the copyrights of the developers whose code was used to train the AI. In fact, testing has shown that AI generated code has already infringed on our copyrights.
• AI does not provide enough value to justify its astronomical cost, both monetary and environmental. In fact, we struggle to see any value AI provides, considering the real threat of security vulnerabilities and inaccuracies.

We value your privacy, and we do not and will not mess around with unproven and unreliable technologies when your privacy is on the line. As such, we currently have no plans to introduce any features that rely on large language models or any other kind of generative AI.

If you are currently using an email provider that offers such features, we strongly encourage you to switch to a provider that doesn’t.

Photo by cottonbro studio.

Update to my blog entry:

https://www.fredonline.fyi/2025/09/port87-label-powered-email.html

I received a message today from Hunter Perrin, the creator of Port 87 - he had seen my blog entry. He advised that, at the time of my testing the product, there was a bug in Port87 preventing the DKIM signing of the auto-responses to bare address emails. He has since fixed the bug, and so it should be working as expected.

I have re-tested again - this time sending from Gmail and Zoho Mail accounts. The verification emails were received as expected in each account.

#Port87 #email

Celebrate New Payment Methods with 50% Off

Port87 now supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and many other payment methods through Stripe!

To celebrate, we’re giving 50% off your first 12 months! Use code YAYSTRIPE50 at checkout. This code will be available for the next month.

If you have a PayPal subscription, don’t worry, it will continue to work. Feel free to cancel it and resubscribe with Stripe to enjoy the 50% discount, though.

#port87

#Port87 now uses Stripe for payments! No more PayPal!!! I should’ve been using it from the beginning. It’s so much better than PayPal in every way.

https://port87.com

I just spent the past 13 hours optimizing my #Postgres database.

The result for query to load the emails (when you have tens of thousands in your account) when you first open #Port87

Before: 0.370 seconds
After: 0.050 seconds

All index scans, no bitmap heap scans. Woo!

The owner of Port87 (Hunter Perrin) has uploaded a YouTube video:

'Email on your own domain is easy!'

https://youtu.be/C1FSFhF-1F4

This video includes the use of Port87 mail. This may be of interest to anyone considering using that service.

#Port87 #email

@sybrand People would have to resend their mail if they originally used the 'bare' address, but if they use the address with the additional label in the first place, they just click on the 'Verify Address' button in the Port87 auto-response email - they don't have to resend. In theory the 'bare' address isn't (or shouldn't be) given out to anyone.

#Port87 #email

@fredonline I might be missing something, but I don't see many people resending an email with the entire message text again and then the correct address. I don't think most people notice or understand this, let alone are capable of it. It doesn't seem very practical to me. #port87

@WildEnte I may not understand their system yet, but I think it's more complex than just plus-addressing, which is possible with many email providers. Whatever email address that's used, it has to be verified by that sender before the email goes through. It does seem to rely on that sender being 'human' to get a response. That wouldn't work for an automated email - for example, notifications of new posts from a forum. However, one can create a label that bypasses the need for verification.

#Port87 #email

Port87 - label powered email:

https://www.fredonline.fyi/2025/09/port87-label-powered-email.html

#Port87 #email

And We’re Out of Beta, We’re Releasing on Time

Port87 is officially out of beta! No more waitlist, no more invite codes!

It’s been a long road to this point, and I’m so excited to finally open Port87 up to the public. Hot on the heels of the custom domains release, this exciting new release allows you to make an account right now, no invite code necessary. This officially marks the end of the beta phase of Port87.

Join today! https://port87.com/

#port87

@hperrin How's it going going with Port87 Mail?

#port87 #email

There’s a secret Easter egg in #Port87 where you can turn the app #pink. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

When I told my wife that because I’m basically always on call for #Port87, I’d need a laptop with me everywhere I go, she was not very pleased with the news. :P

What do you call software that tricks you into clicking an ad? I call it malware. #Gmail is #malware. As long as I’m in charge, https://port87.com will never do that. #email #port87 #google

Now that I have a lot more control of #notifications from my #email with #Port87, I’ve noticed how redundant #PushNotifications are for most apps. So I’ve turned off notifications on several apps so far. https://port87.com

Honestly, the best promotion of #Port87 Mail is probably just a screenshot of the major players’ apps. There’s a trend in #email services to inject ads that look like unread email into your inbox. It’s disgusting, and I would never do that in Port87. Tricking your users into clicking ads is what #malware does. Try https://port87.com instead.

I wrote an article about how #Port87 helps with organizing your #email.

I actually signed up for some newsletters and mailing lists recently. I haven't done that in like 15 years.

https://sciactive.com/2023/07/17/the-best-email-for-those-who-struggle-with-organization/

Fun Fact: when you start a new #email server, #Gmail, #Yahoo, etc, will mark everything you send as spam. You have to separately message everyone you email to tell them to check their spam folder for your email and mark it not spam. After about two weeks of this tedious process, they will start to deliver your messages properly.

Gmail is starting to deliver #Port87 Mail invite emails to users’ inboxes. How did we let big business take away one of the few free protocols we have?

This is why #Port87 Mail is so nice. I've gotten 4 emails from Newegg, from 3 different addresses on 2 different domins, and I spent 0 minutes configuring a filter to put them all in the Newegg label.

I just gave them the #email address [email protected] and they all go there automatically.

If you wanna join the waitlist, check out https://port87.com

It took so long to write the code to sanitize the email body. It supports all the same #CSS that Gmail does, so if an #email looks good in Gmail, it will look good in #Port87.

The sanitization works both server side and client side, so there's no loading bar when you go to the page; you just instantly see a fully rendered email.

I just signed up for my first account using my #Port87 Mail address, and it worked perfectly! The email looks so good! I'm really excited that it worked so well. :D

I never had to set up the special email address for it, I just typed [email protected] into the email field, and Port87 made the mxtoolbox label for me.

The invite emails for #Port87 Mail are going to Gmail's spam folder. Yet one more reason Gmail sucks.

Today I’m opening my #email service, #Port87, up to the public for beta testing. It’s a first come first serve waitlist. Come join! https://port87.com/

Port87 automatically organizes your email and prevents spam!

I’ve been having trouble with some unforeseen bugs while getting #Port87 Mail ready to launch, and Elon blowing up #Twitter today makes me feel a lot better about that.

I made something really cool today that’s still boggling my mind. Iterable and cancellable remote procedure calls in my #JavaScript #ORM #NymphJS!

Wow, that’s a lot of tech jargon. The problem is that when you empty your trash folder in #Port87 Mail, that runs on the server, and it could take a long time if you have a lot of trash. So I want to show a progress bar and let you cancel it.

...

https://sciactive.com/2023/06/14/iterable-cancellable-rpcs-in-nymphjs/

This was such an incredibly difficult problem to solve. #Email can include #CSS, but that CSS can be dangerous to show in a web page. So I now have a CSS parser in #Port87 that sanitizes, filters, and properly scopes the CSS in your email before showing it to you.

If an email looks good in #Gmail, it will look good in Port87 Mail! :D

It’s pretty cool to see a real search returning real results on my #Port87 Mail mobile app. (This is a very early #development build, and not how the final app will look.) It’s built with #SvelteNative, which lets you build a #NativeScript app with #SvelteJS!