> Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.

Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on.

Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty monopolized protocol since then - most people have a hard time to get their mails delivered from a private server nowadays.