DeGoogle Yourself

This is a great question.

I can guarantee it will be around a year from now (unless California or the United States is no longer around). I have no plans to close it or stop offering the service. I’m funding it myself, and I have enough to keep it going without profit for several years (probably over five years). For now, I’m letting people on through a waitlist so I can control its growth and understand the limits of the current servers. Then I can set up automatic provisioning based on those metrics.

I’m trying to self fund it through profitability, so that the only people I have to answer to are my customers, rather than investors, who may not have the best interest of the customers in mind.

As for twenty years in the future, I would love to still be in control of it, but I can’t guarantee that. If I do sell it, one of my top priorities will be that the new owner maintain the current domain name and users. Or if I step down as CEO, I would choose a successor that shares my vision and motivations.

I’ll also be supporting custom domains in the near future, so if you join and use your own domain, then you could always transfer that to a new provider if anything does happen to the service.

I hope that answers your question well and alleviates any concerns you have.

Here’s the privacy policy:

https://port87.com/privacy-policy

You get 500MB free storage, and you can receive unlimited email. Here’s the breakdown of subscriptions:

• $0.99/month to send unlimited messages.
• $1.99/month for 2GB
• $5.99/month for 10GB
• $9.99/month for 20GB
• $19.99/month for 100GB
• $39.99/month for 1TB

I’m working on a mobile app that will be free. For now, the web app is a progressive web app, so you can install that to your home screen and it works like a mobile app.

I’m also working on other features that aren’t ready yet, but they’ll be premium features:

• IMAP, SMTP, and CardDAV support.
• Custom domain support.
• Additional users for your custom domain.

So basically the business model is pretty similar to other email services. One difference is that I charge for sending mail, and basically that’s to prevent spam. Spammers are unlikely to use a real payment account, because it will get shut down when they’re caught spamming.

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.