From DHH’s long-winded keynote at Rails World 2026. He was bragging that Hey’s backend is so efficient because it’s written in Rust (which he hates and refuses to read).
From DHH’s long-winded keynote at Rails World 2026. He was bragging that Hey’s backend is so efficient because it’s written in Rust (which he hates and refuses to read).
I remember when HEY first came out, I got to try it and thought it was kinda useless. Defining an entire email service by the removal of one step from any other email service seems silly. (Coming from a guy who’s actually written a unique email service.)
I do appreciate some of the philosophy of Hey, like cherishing the human-to-human section of your inbox. But it’s simply not worth the price tag. Also now that DHH has proudly proclaimed he does not read any of the code, I don’t think it’s even worth it for free, if I’m gambling with my data. I just self-host Stalwart and Bulwark.
Legend.
Might I ask what options you support for email import/export, migration, and third-party clients?
Right now, only downloading single emails. This is an area I’d really like to improve on though. The single best option, and what I’ll be working on as soon as I’m done with mailing lists, is supporting IMAP. That will let you import/export mail directly, and give support for a bunch of third party clients. Unfortunately, because Port87 is very different than other email services, I’m going to have to write my own IMAP server. I have the spec printed out in a binder in my office, so I’ll be getting started on it pretty soon. That’s a big big project though, so realistically, it’ll probably be over a year, maybe two, before Port87 supports it.