This is a difficult post.
Spamgourmet has been running for over 18 years now (that's a long time for an internet thing). We've maintained a non-commercial, privacy centered approach that was much more common on the internet in say, 1998, than it is in 2018. I will never give up on it. Not getting caught up with financial concerns and over-recording and misusing data from our users has kept operating costs low and management fairly trouble free. It has also made spamgourmet pretty unattractive as an acquisition target, which is definitely part of the plan.
This approach has worked very well. But I knew that if the time ever came where I needed to move away, there could be some challenge to be absolutely sure that things will continue as they have (or greatly improve - that's certainly possible ) after I walk away. Specifically, it's not the first transfer I'm worried about - I'm fairly certain I can find a trustworthy person or group -- rather it's the second transfer that troubles me.
That's because, by today's standards, the transfer is asking a lot: take over a system written by someone else which will make no money, and run it for a really long time before the challenging task of finding yet another trustworthy person to take it over. Of course, simply shutting down the system solves this problem, but would be pretty painful to a lot of people. Honestly, though, it would be preferable to blindly handing off control of the service to the wrong place.
About two months ago, after some surgery I was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme ("GBM"). This is a grade 4 brain cancer. It's considered terminal and incurable, and the average survival time is something like 18 months from diagnosis. I'm getting world-class medical care and I'm optimistic that I will be around longer than average - even much longer. I'm also very hopeful that medical advances will greatly improve the prognosis, and that I will stay alive long enough to benefit from them. However, given the nature of the disease, we have to consider that even if I'm alive, I could lose my ability to continue running spamgourmet effectively, and that this could happen pretty soon. So something has to be done.
So - I want to bring back up the discussion about things that could be done. I'll post more to this thread -- these days I'm trying to avoid words like 'brainstorm' (haha. ok, not funny), but that's what needs to happen.