About
brev is Swedish for letter. The mark is ᛒ, the birch rune: the birch-bark letters dug out of Novgorod are the oldest surviving body of ordinary private mail in Europe, and they survived because someone kept the archive.
Why the archive came first
brev started from the storage, not the interface. The founding problem was mail spread across several accounts at several providers, each of which can lock you out, shut down, change its terms or lose your data, and none of which gives you a copy you can use. brev's answer is an archive on your own disk that is the primary copy: the provider becomes where the mail arrives, not where it lives. The client was built afterwards, as a separate program that opens that archive read-only, and the agents afterwards again, through the same contract.
The direction after launch runs from the archive outward: helping people self-host mail completely, an interface so an existing webmail such as Roundcube can run on top of the brev archive, and mail servers themselves. That is why the archive has a documented schema — other things are meant to be built on it — and why migration exists: the step after moving your mail between providers is being your own provider.
brev is published by HyperClank, alongside Gantry, as infrastructure for cognitive sovereignty, individual and collective.