Creating 103mail.com

Creating 103mail.com - The plan

11 Apr 2024 - by 'Maurits van der Schee'

I am building a free email service that respects privacy and prevents profiling on 103mail.com. The simple premise is that even if you don't use Gmail then Google still has half of the world's email messages and since email messages tend to contain all previous content, they can still profile all people in the world (even people that try to avoid Google). When using 103mail.com the email (content) will never leave the server. The outgoing email will be replaced with a notification with a link to the web mail viewer. Thus the outgoing mail content can only be viewed over the web and people or servers reading the mail will be logged. Nevertheless 103mail.com will be a standard compliant IMAP/SMTP server that can be used with any mail client on desktop or mobile.

The plan

The plan is to do the following steps:

Capture outgoing email to a web hook, while allowing local delivery (see: Update 1)
Notify the recipient, with a (secured) link to the mail body
Implement a really nice (logging) web based email viewer
Allow people to sign up and change their password
Implement retention rules: mail (2 years), attachments (2 months)

Optionally we implement the following:

Block incoming email (secure notification service)
Create new mail via the web (ticket system)
Reply via the viewer (secure reply)
Web mail client (for instance Roundcube)
Support for custom domains (commercially supported)

What's next?

In the upcoming weeks or months this blog will contain several updates on the progress of the 103mail.com mail service. Maybe it will succeed, maybe it will fail. You'll read it here :-)

TQ
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