I had high hopes for Skiff, but once again it became yet another incredible journey and an entire VC grift racing to an acquisition only for it to be shut down just like the majority of VC fuelled startups who probably ran out of money.
The end users are always left holding the bag and continue to lose in the process of anything VC funded these days.
Glancing at the file, it appears to be an original MBOX format export, that is "From " with no quoting, etc. That's rough.
https://github.com/skiff-org/skiff-apps
Skiff whitepaper and project. Looks interesting
It's the cheapest option i found, i pay less than 10 $ a year.
It works perfectly on Thunderbird. With CalDAV and CardDAV support you have a standard protocol for your contacts and calendar; very portable.
Might have been the plan all along, even. Sad
Part of maintaining a healthy work/life balance to be able to keep things separated.
I enjoy thinking back about stuff I made, knowing it's out there doing its job.
I can separate out my work (which, lest we forget, is the majority of my waking hours, because of the reality of working a full time job) but that's not particularly good for my mental health either. It's part of the reason I am looking to branch out my career into a different, perhaps more durable sphere.
All I'm saying is, if it's affecting you, changing aspects about your career is valid. Just getting used to it doesn't work for me, despite it being fine for others.
As I see it you're basically arguing for less focus on innovation. Skiff failed as a business. To not waste resources would mean it had to never have existed in the first place. That means you need to limit the desire of investment in risky or innovative ventures as most of those will fail. When they fail the resources used for them are wasted. This is because if you limit the ability of companies to exit to recoup some loses then you increase risk for starting a company. It also doesn't prevent waste in any way since the existing large companies (now even larger due to less competition) can still internally make and kill products at will. Or just do things very inefficiently.
Tech book - https://book.peergos.org
Source - https://github.com/peergos/peergos
Sign up to our server - https://peergos.net/?signup=true
We also use a p2p and self-authenticated protocol so it is easy to migrate servers whilst keeping your identity, friends and data.
The reason Notion acquires and kills this product is not because it is in any way an interesting product or company to them but because it has investors that need bailing out that are also Notion investors. Notion gets some nice people in their team and some of them might even stay.
This is a very common practice in silicon valley. VC funded companies fail all the time. Instead of letting them go bankrupt, investors and founders swap shares and walk away with an "exit" in their pocket. Everybody wins.
The only thing I can come up with is that the tech doesn't drop in as is because of the encryption so if they have to rebuild it under Notion’s brand do a clean cut and reboot targeting Notion’s market.
Running mail is hard.
Running mail is hard.
Candidly, the ability to profit off of email as a service is probably not a challenge that many businesses are up to. Deliverability is a massive pain in the ass. Unless you have the team and are well established, starting up or re-badging a mail service would be a nightmare.
Good email is expensive for a (bad) reason.
I'd bet they'll either unravel the E2EE from Skiff's software to relaunch it under their brad, or use their newly acquired expertise to build a Notion Email service from the ground up.
And then 5 paragraphs with corporate blabber, a 6th with the important instructions (or a link to it; telling you it's not that bad to loose your account) and a 7nd with corporate blabber.
They really got bought from corporate.
I’m really upset about this, I was about to go all in on Skiff after being burnt by ProtonMail.
Glad I didn’t. Feel really bad for those who did.
Also Discord was like "yeah you may have your Discord credentials, but we need you to check your email before you can log in again anyway." So I lost my Discord account, too.
But I started using this new thing called Skiff and . . . Oh.
That's it - i will not point out the features here as you can look it up yourself. Just the relevancy for this topic: berlin based company with a CEO that is highly skilled, involved in protocol standartization and very much into privacy topics and free software. i am also pretty much sure they will stay arou d for years to come, as they don't sell you into bs statements nobody can hold onto and are just rock solid business. fits my bill..
I do not like to do advertisement for anyone and really think calling out for some company is a no-go. Except one that has its product open source to full extend. But this does not apply here - its a central service you simply have to trust.. EMail is different. As you can, but shall but better not host that mess yourself. So that's the excuse for me doing advertisement here as a one-time exception..
Someone had recommended me Skiff, but I stayed away from it and opted for Proton, given that they have been around for a while and Skiff smelled like VC money too much. I guess it was the right choice.
At this point, a criteria I try to follow when I have to choose whether or not to rely on a tool is: is it funded by VC? If so, steer clear.
I was considering Skiff or Fastmail. Skiff was just over a year old with over $10 million in VC funding. Fastmail is 20+ years old and is funded by their own subscription fees.
I was concerned Skiff would be looking for a buyer eventually and things would change for the worse. Definitely didn't expect a full shutdown though.
I did created an account just few months ago with the intention to use it on few remaining sites where I was registered under local mail service that got filled with ads since takeover (which also bring 2FA but you have to use a dedicated app and nothing else works). Well, what a pity - another round for tuta, proton or seznam. They had this "rewards" system a'la dropbox where you could get additional space.
I’m a big fan of Notion but these hires/acquu-hires are a deathknell indicator. It means they’ve hit that point where the ideas have stopped flowing but the money hasn’t, so they start using the money instead of their own creative juices. It’s a shame because there’s still so many places Notion could improve.
The way I see it, we have more ideas than we have people to work on them, but we have plenty of money in the bank. So, we buy a small company close to one of our idea so we can work on it now, instead of in 2-3 years time. I’m bummed we aren’t keeping Skiff’s mail product running though.
Overall Notion has matured a bit more to a place we can make more investments in the future, especially on the engineering side. I’m finally working on a performance focused architecture project I’ve wanted to do since 2019 — that doesn’t feel like death knell to me.
The only thing I see winning against Google and Microsoft is some hybrid, open source local + cloud suite of tools. Something better than Thunderbird, more like Obsidian. A combination of native and cloud, working well across all platforms, integrated with a full suite of other productivity/office tools, but most importantly open source. Because I don't want to trust my data to some other tool that will just dry up and disappear.
That's a steep gradient to climb. Really steep.
I'm at the stage where for anything important I will be very reluctant to choose software that hasn't been around and well known for a long time. I can't recall the name of that idea that the longer something has survived, the longer it can be expected to survive in the future but it's definitely applicable to software.
Does anyone know how to switch these out to point to another provider, e.g., purelymail/fastmail/proton, without downtime? I mean I would not like to miss emails during the transfer. Is that even possible?
You also need to take care of SPF / DKIM / DMARC, but those records are for outbound mail.
Can anyone recommend a privacy focused email provider that can run free or cheap custom domains?
* Android app sending incomplete emails. Sometimes the email would just be truncated once I checked it in my sent folder. They claim this is fixed in their Beta app, but I have not confirmed.
* A large (12-ish-GB) file repeatedly failing to download from Proton Drive, both through the web interface and their desktop app. Took many attempts before it finally worked through the web UI. So... don't use Drive for critical backups without other copies around.
Both of the above were encountered in the last year. Aside form that I've had no other problems that I can remember in all these years, so I've been generally happy with it.
I know these because I have spent time looking the past week for getting off Outlook.com. I've basically settled on Runbox.com as it seems to be the most established and stable.
Yet another entry for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
They prepend a 4 digit PIN-code before the actual 2fa code - which of course is not compatible with password managers. It all feels so... clumsy.
Other than that, it seems like a great service (i'm testing the trial version.)
[1] https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/how-to-use...
I think the only path small players have is as an acquisition.
I've adopted Anytype; encryption + self-hosting + open-source backend is rock solid.
On of the hardest parts is spam filtering both for incoming and outgoing traffic. In particular outgoing, so, e.g., a compromised or malicious user, can have harsh repercussions by big providers like M$ (Outlook) and Google. You can find a myriad of stories just on HN about these platforms literally not even allowing you to apply for access after an incident happened.
And your users won't care that M$, Google or Yahoo behaves like this, they will only care about their emails not being delivered by/ to you.
I had an internship at $company that offers manages hosting for Email along with web shops. The technical setup is the easier part of the business.
Proton paid plan is around 10$ a month so it isn't cheap. But cheap isn't sustainable.
Source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acWkkLaEsrU (Proton CEO interview)
Especially for my personal life where long term really means long term, self-hosted is the only safe option.
As an employee it's a toss up on whether your employer or your SaaS dependency changes course first. So a shorter term engagement is basically guaranteed and it doesn't matter that much.
I still remember when Optical CD claiming 30+ years lifetime -- they failed, but they tried
life insurance policy exists too
Getting bought out or IPO'ing on stock market are generally best options, especially with the uncertainty of the next 10 years, which then allows you to be able to essentially stop working for a period of time.
Otherwise the game is you can fall behind developing features, where heavily funded startups simply copy everything you've spent years designing, catching up by cutting their time and effort down since feature sets have already been curated down to a model that works, and you either find a way to survive or competitors take your clients.
Those heavily funded startups who can always outcompete what a stable and long-term business will be willing or able to pay - subsidized by the VC industrial complex, as an additional way to kill competition - on the micro level but also on the macro level - making VC funded companies more likely to succeed overall; even if it's sucking talent away from good or more worthwhile efforts - and also at the expense of the general population, as the VC industrial complex also requires higher fees to be charged; it's inflammatory-inflationary.
There's also the acquihire model in regards to consolidation, which overall doesn't seem good for the consumer but can give a good payout.
Acquihire and product shutdown.
That said, Google and Microsoft essentially have monopolies in their respective areas of the market (Gmail in consumer, Outlook in B2B), and if you think they aren't slowly letting these products decline while cranking up the revenue extraction...you're dead wrong.
With LLMs they could eliminate spam in a much more reliable way without killing off small senders, tomorrow. Yet, they will never devote any real resources to these products, since they don't have to. Nobody wants to go through the hassle of changing their email.
Outlook still uses the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine, completely unchanged, from 20 years ago. That's all you need to know about the incentives for innovation after you've successfully captured a network.
Even with all that I still get dozens of scams and spam emails a day.
Tell me you don't understand inference costs without telling me.
C'mon. This is a forum called Hackernews.
When I came back to it later, and my subscription had expired, instead of downgrading my account to the free version, they wouldn't allow me to access any of my emails until I renewed my account for another year.
Only real complaint I have is that Proton Drive is web-only. No supported API, either. We desperately need a Linux CLI and/or sync tool.
Edit: I meant a Linux tool. There are windows/mac/ios/android apps. Updated my post.
I think you don't hear about the 'silent majority' as much on the internet versus the small minority that's frustrated about something and complains about it.
Proton is simply the best service available at the moment if you value privacy above best usability.
Having said that, there are some limitations that need solving, for example; - can't increase text size in emails (iOS app.) such a basic feature... (you can only pinch to zoom which doesn't work on a small screen.) Some emails are nearly impossible to read. - searching is terrible (it's much much better in the web client, you can even search mail contents there.) - can't get notifications for specific email threads / contacts
For now, i'm happy to pay a company that invests in my privacy, and thereby support future improvements.
[sorry]