Mail held at the post office until called for.
The whole philosophy in two words: the house holds your mail until you come for it. Nothing pushes.
A house where everything is mail. A self-hosted correspondence layer for the agentic stack: every thing gets an address, every address receives letters, every letter is kept, and nothing arrives unless you come for it.
Status: Phase 4/5 — the house is built and wired; Phase 7 fix pass applied. The archive spine (postgres + qdrant + FTS, merged by RRF), the letter server (Hono), the whisper (with visible reasoning), the reference client (Vite + React, Horizon View as a transit diagram, pub view), and the MCP face (agents as residents) are all live. Open Design window continues (2 months, granted 2026-08-29); the framework is the product, the software is the reference implementation.
Every thing in your life gets an address, every address receives letters, every letter is kept, and nothing arrives unless you come for it.
Pre-IRC, two 14-year-olds exchanged floppy disks with text files on them as letters. The principle still holds: technology enables users to communicate on their own terms — or it should. The house's constraint isn't 1.44MB, it's asynchrony: the letter waits. Nothing pushes. Presence not pressure — hold, never ping; visible not sent.
- The address space is the spine. Everything has an address (
you@house,hermes@house,feed:lurker@house,archive@house). The address book is the social graph. - The mailbox protocol is the whole protocol. Envelope + markdown body. Async by default. Threads are correspondences. Bridges to IMAP/SMTP, Matrix, ActivityPub.
- The archive is the memory. postgres (letters) + qdrant (semantics) + minio (payloads). Plural time: Gregorian is the index, frames are the addresses. Retrieval: exact + FTS + semantic, merged by RRF.
- The resident is the collaborator. The whisper surfaces the gap — six gap types, convergent by construction, derived from the active frame. Offer not audition, gap not surprise, reassessment not apology. The address is the meaning (Nancy).
- The house is headless; the UI is composed. The house has no UI of its own — it exposes primitives as a protocol. The user composes the space (cmux, shell, obsidian, neomutt); the house generates the letters. Composable, not generative.
Privacy as schema, anti-hierarchy as capability, queer/indigenous/global-majority empowerment as positive design, mutual aid as funding. Every value has a schema consequence. If the schema doesn't have it, the value isn't real.
| Layer | Choice | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Letter server | TypeScript + Hono | ✅ built (server/) |
| Archive spine | postgres 15 (shared instance) + qdrant + FTS, merged by RRF | ✅ built |
| The whisper | house letters + gap detection (dormant threads, unanswered questions), visible reasoning | ✅ built |
| Reference client | Vite + React (Tauri v2 later) | ✅ built (client/) |
| Agent integration | MCP server — agents become residents | ✅ built, registered with Hermes |
| Raw payloads | minio (S3-compatible) | ⬜ target — out of two-month scope |
| Ingestion queue | redis | ⬜ target — out of two-month scope |
| Audio letters | faster-whisper | ⬜ target — out of two-month scope |
| Local brain | ollama (embeddings, 768-dim) | ✅ live |
| Bridges | IMAP/SMTP (primary), Matrix + ActivityPub (optional) | ⬜ target — out of two-month scope |
| Deployment | docker-compose, tailscale for access | ⬜ target — out of two-month scope |
- Not a product with a price list. No wallet, no x402, no USDC, no "100+ tools." Postage is free.
- Not a platform. A house. Small, domestic, self-hosted, yours.
- Not a recommendation engine. The house answers the question you asked and offers what's missing from the work you're doing. It does not try to keep you in the room.
- Not a servant. A resident. It offers, it reassesses, it can be wrong and says so.
The house needs postgres 15 and qdrant (and ollama for embeddings). The server defaults to local infra:
npm install
npm run build # server + client
npm test # unit tests (server + client)
npm run test:integration --workspace server # needs POSTE_RESTANTE_INTEGRATION=1 + live infranpm run serve --workspace server # the letter server, http://localhost:8787
npm run dev --workspace client # the reference client, http://localhost:5173 (proxies /v1)
npm run serve:mcp --workspace server # the MCP face — agents become residentsThe MCP face is registered with Hermes as poste-restante (17 tools: deliver, search, mailbox, whisper, gaps). The house is headless — the client is a client, not the client.
SPEC.md— the framework spec (v0.1, for Open Design review)SKETCH.md— the manifestoPRODUCT.md— product intentDESIGN.md— design north starARCHITECTURE.md— current code realityCONTRACT.md— the protocol contract
AGPL-3.0. The house is a house, not a product — the code is as free as the postage.