Hi, I’m Hunter Perrin. I created an email service called Port87.
I have ADHD, and keeping my email organized has always been a struggle. Three years ago, I started using a new organization strategy for my email where I’d add plus tags and use filters to move them into labels, “hperrin+whatever@gmail”. This worked for a few months until I got lazy and stopped creating the filters. Then my inbox slowly became just as messy as before.
So I spent the last two years writing my own email service that does it automatically. You can’t even use your address without a label. Everything is organized based on the address you give out, so I have an address for everything.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you guys. It’s my experience of using my own email service. Obviously, I’m biased, but I still think it’s a valid take on the struggles of email organization with ADHD. If nothing else, maybe the plus tag system can help you out with your current email provider. :)
Happy you found something that works.
What works best for my personal email address is very aggressively unsubscribing from notifications and labeling spam as spam.
Now that I only rarely get emails, I can very easily keep up to date.
A 5 minute glance into my email app is enough to be up to date for the last 2-3 days. About once a week I might receive a mail that actually requires action or a response.
Work is different. But I guess I get paid at work, so I spend way more time on my work email. But I don’t like automatically filing work email, because if someone mails me, I need to take notice and perhaps respond. ADHD helps me with a positive reputation that I respond quickly when I not busy.
IMO Gmail is just terrible. Back in 2004 it was cool, but it’s UX has stagnated for a long time, and almost anything is better. We switched from Outlook to Gmail at work and it’s been awful for me. I loved the way Outlook handled meetings and reminders. It was also much easier to identify important mail. Everything looks like junk in Gmail, no matter how I tweak the layout and filters.
Personally I use ProtonMail, and I just started using Zoho too, both are faster, cleaner, and overall a much better experience.
Gmail has also started putting ads that look like unread emails. We used to call software that tried to trick you into clicking ads “malware”.
Continue to call it malware, that’s perfectly appropriate
I tried Proton, but there are so few features (search doesn’t work like a ‘normal’ email provider) and it’s very limited in general. I went for Fastmail instead which has storage, a great calendar (I work with multiple timezones and it’s a lifesaver), and ‘masked’ email addresses so you can sign up for things and delete it later if you want.
Gmail supports IMAP, so just use any client you like?
That’s an option for some, it’s disabled by our enterprise policy. Anyway, that means setting up a third-party app on multiple systems - not a great solution unless you’re in the mood for hosting a web client somewhere.
I just read your article and tried emailing your “bare address” to test the auto response, as suggested. Very clever!
I’ve just signed up with another provider but I’d be very tempted if you ever have an instance based in the EU.
How does this work with mobile clients, actually?
My instance and all my servers are based in California, which has (IMO) the next best data protection laws after the EU, but I definitely want to expand into the EU.
Right now, it only has a progressive web app, so you can do all the usual things of putting it on your home screen and getting push notifications, but it’s not an actual native app.
I’m working on a native mobile app. That will probably be ready mid next year. (Right now custom domain support and domain user management are taking priority.)
I’ll also be writing an IMAP server for it, so you’ll eventually be able to use it with any IMAP client (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc.).
Great news. I’ll be following with interest. Well done. Email isn’t an easy place to innovate IMO.
Thank you. :)
Congrats on the effort to build and launch! Looks interesting. I personally gave up trying to “organise” email a decade ago. I just mark as unread until I can follow up or create a todo. If it’s read it’s handled. Once every couple of years I do a bulk archive/delete based on sender or keywords. That’s my entire email org system and it never fails, because it’s dead simple — It’s the only area of my life where I’ve felt like I’ve consistently had my shit together no matter what’s going on; having been through numerous todo apps and other org systems that never feel easy or remain adequately organised, so are eventually abandoned for something else…
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I hereby introduce misc+whatever@gmail.com
I do this too, but it is addressed in the post and is a problem which has caught me out on occasion:
A surprising amount of forms simply disallow the + symbol and consider anything containing it to be an invalid email. Worse is when a form allows it, but the subsequent login form doesn’t and then you’re immediately locked out of an account you just created.
The hyphen idea is better, but I’m not sure whether that’s too much of a common symbol and would be too restrictive to disallow in a username for this service, and if it’s not disallowed then I wonder about the security implications that could cause.
Correct, hyphen is not allowed in a username on Port87.
These are the allowed symbols:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789
Yes, there is a section in the article that talks about this. It is a good solution to an extent, but has several problems.
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