I&#x27;m trying to build an email platform too, yes it&#x27;s hard. But I thought it was only because I&#x27;m a beginner and 1 man team.<p>Some of the reasons why I think it&#x27;s hard:<p>* I don&#x27;t think security was a big deal to many of the mail applications when they were being built. I tried and gave up so many times trying to find a strong hashing algorithm that both dovecot and ruby supported. There was practically no documentation on this and it felt like I was venturing into territory never before seen.<p>* Parsing emails to be display correctly seems impossible. Sometimes emails have &quot;&lt;br&gt;&quot; in them and sometimes they have &quot;\n&quot;. But what if the &quot;\n&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean newline but it&#x27;s just what someone wrote in the email? They come in a variety of mime types and formats. It sometimes seems impossible to do this.<p>* Not everyone uses the RFC standards! I thought the RFC said that a subject can only be 78 chars long. Yet I get emails all day long that go way beyond this which cause major problems in my code. AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE THAT CARES ABOUT RFCS?