🤖 The key moments of building keymail — the story, where the prompt ledger is the log. keymail went from an empty directory to a deployed, federated, end-to-end-encrypted mail service in its first two days; this page is the honest short version of how.
The first commit: two federated keymail instances exchanging sealed mail, subject and body encrypted in the browser, first contact gated by proof of work. The test suite greps the recipient server's raw SQLite to prove no plaintext ever hit disk — the one rule, enforced from the first hour.
The webmail arrives in one long day: inbox, compose, drafts, contacts, archive, undo send — plus passkey sign-in and the encrypted key vault, so an account is a passkey and a sealed blob, never a password.
The single static binary learns to terminate its own HTTPS (Let's Encrypt, no reverse proxy) and the OpenTofu canaries go up — the same day the first mailbox on keymail.dev is claimed.
Seven stacked pull requests built unattended while the human slept: end-to-end encrypted attachments, trash with a 30-day purge, Gmail-style address normalisation, a mobile-first inbox, rich text (Markdown, same bytes on every engine) — each deployed to the dev canary and verified in a real WebKit browser before the next began.
The challenge-MX doorbell lands code-complete: a sender from the old email world gets a doorbell instead of a bounce — prove you're real and your mail is sealed at the door. Dark by design until the MX cutover.
This site: the carbon tally, the contributor index and the prompt ledger go public at status.keymail.dev, and keeping them honest becomes part of the codebase's own end-of-session routine.