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. :)
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