Port87 does not use your email to train AI. Port87 also does not use AI to read your email. We do not use AI in the development of Port87. Port87’s code is written by real people, and much of it is open source.
We do not use AI for a number of reasons:
- Training AI on private email content can leak private information. It is possible to craft a prompt to retrieve verbatim copies of real emails used to train them.
- Using AI to read email can introduce security vulnerabilities. Agentic AI can be targeted using a technique called “prompt injection” to divulge private information to malicious third parties.
- AI is prone to hallucinations and inaccurate results.
- AI generated code is unreliable, unmaintainable, and prone to security vulnerabilities.
- AI generated code may infringe on the copyrights of the developers whose code was used to train the AI. In fact, testing has shown that AI generated code has already infringed on our copyrights.
- AI does not provide enough value to justify its astronomical cost, both monetary and environmental. In fact, we struggle to see any value AI provides, considering the real threat of security vulnerabilities and inaccuracies.
We value your privacy, and we do not and will not mess around with unproven and unreliable technologies when your privacy is on the line. As such, we currently have no plans to introduce any features that rely on large language models or any other kind of generative AI.
If you are currently using an email provider that offers such features, we strongly encourage you to switch to a provider that doesn’t.
Why It’s a Hard No-Go for Us
Even if all of the problems with the quality of AI generated code were solved, and we understand that some will say we are there now, Port87 will not be developed with AI. We value our authorship of our code. Not only is it important to us to understand our code, it is important to us to own our code. In the most literal sense, when you use AI, you do not own the code it produces.
We own all of the code we have produced for Port87, because we wrote all of it. Nobody can argue against that point. There are plenty of other email providers who cannot say the same thing.
The SciActive Human Contribution Policy
We value the human authorship of our code so much that we created the SciActive Human Contribution Policy. Our open source projects have already adopted it, and we made it free so that anyone else’s can too.
We even created a seal to show that your project values human authorship:
There is a license available to use this seal on your project if you adopt the Human Contribution Policy.