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.
You can also use a plus sign if you want to, but it’s not accepted everywhere, so I recommend using hyphen instead. One example is that Microsoft doesn’t accept plus signs in emails addresses, but does accept hyphens.
Usernames in Port87 can only contain letters and numbers, so there isn’t any issue with using it as a separator.
MS shadowbans my Proton email domains also. They’re a data broker and don’t want you to be able to hide your identity. People used + in their emails for exactly the reason and they figured that out.
The reason is that + is specified in the RFC as being for email aliases, so many systems ban it because they don’t want you to be able to track who they got your email from. A hyphen, on the other hand, is a normal character.
You’re no RFC compliant doing what you’re doing, but the advertiser won’t catch on immediately because of it.
I don’t believe there’s any RFC that says I can’t or shouldn’t do what I’m doing. The only RFC concerning subaddressing I can find is RFC 5233 (and the one it obsoletes). That one only concerns sieve filtering, which I’m not doing, and it specifies that any character can be configured as the separator character. The three examples it gives are “+”, “#”, and “–“.