I’ll try to go into more detail than the home page.

You don’t use your “bare” address (yourname@port87.com) 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 the sender’s 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, as a reason someone you don’t know would email you. So you can actually give out your bare address anywhere without worrying about spam. For example, mine is hperrin@port87.com.

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:

https://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. (Part of why my storage costs are higher than an off-the-shelf email server is because I have indexes for fields they don’t in order to allow you to search for anything you want.)

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.