PostieDay 36 · 5 October 2026
Chapter 2 · 35 days to the chapter deadline
- Investigate Interaction Options - Expo over IMAP
With the start of the new chapter I've been thinking back to what my gauge for progress is being. I originally thought that the essential things I needed for Postie were the following:
- IMAP Integration - mainly so that people could use Postie in other apps and because I didn't want to lock things down unnecessarily having to increase complexity by building the apps myself across android and iOS...
- Migrations - so that people could bring their email with them - this would be either through Gmail and Microsoft or again IMAP
After looking into the possibilities for IMAP I realised that email has become locked down today in all practical terms. Even though email is an open standard with open protocols you cannot have external servers which handle processing even as a gateway because many VM providers block the ports for incoming and external email. Spam is a valid concern with this which is why I get the reasoning but I know also from my own personal experience even if I was sending via an external service in high volume and not directly through the VM itself if the app is hosted on this VM they could also use it as an excuse to terminate things even if it doesn't make sense.
As such I've made the annoying (and somewhat heartbreaking) decision to table IMAP integration and focus now on native Postie apps for iOS / Android. Forget the portable nature of IMAP I realise to realise my vision of better collaboration with teams and agents having my own app infra is probably the only way forward.
I spent today looking at the feasibility and took the first step towards using Expo to handle the IOS and Android side of things. Expo makes sense because although I'm not using React Native but Tanstack for the Postie web here there's enough overlap that it does seem like the most reasonable solution for a small team of 1. Also keeping to what I know (JS/TS) over native Swift and Java makes the most sense at this time.
Today began the start of planning for this. It's not going to happen overnight but hopefully in the next month (as I have access to both iOS and Android devices) at least an app which won't be completely crap will be the a good bar.