FEBRUARY 11 EDIT: DO NOT USE SKIFF. They were acquired by a bigger company and have effectively backstabbed their whole userbase. The article below has not been edited, but every positive thing I say about Skiff is now invalid.
TLDR: You can now send emails to me at jake the shift + 2 symbol lmbx.me.
And email as a technology sucks.
- The weird text is to prevent spam. Yes, it’s an actual thing
Maintaining a minimal website without user comments and mailing lists is easy. But I think it’s an ok idea to at least keep a channel open if anyone wants to contact me about this website. There’s two protocols I’m willing to use if I want to communicate with strangers.
- Matrix
No normie uses the first option (yet). If I want to increase the chance of someone contacting me by orders of magnitude, I needed to put out an email address. But it’s not as easy as just putting up:
you can reach me at jake email_symbol gmail.com
*This is not my account. I have no idea who it belongs to.
Using a Gmail account for contact though? That’s not cool. It’s like finding a local restaurant that uses Hotmail (yes, really) for their server application recruiting address. It doesn’t look good. Or even a bigger franchise; I saw a Gong Cha looking for applicants using a Gmail account. You’re a big business, please get your own domain.
I’m not a big business, but that’s what I wanted too.
I would only share an email address if it had the domain @lmbx.me.
I also just don’t want to use big tech services,
and there are plenty of ways to get email.
There’s two ways to accomplish this.
- Pay for a email hosting service
- Host your own email server
I tried the second one on my old domain and it didn’t last long. And I was not willing to retry it. Self-hosting is cool, but sometimes I do want something that is low maintenance; especially for something as critical as communications.
Ideally the whole world is using superior protocols like XMPP and Matrix, or at least using Signal for instant messaging. But reality is often disappointing. Email is like SMS: an old, insecure protocol that has become deeply embedded within modern society. Half of the world would crumble tomorrow if email disappeared. I don’t like email, but I have to play along with the system.
So, this time I decided to use an email provider to make my domain accessible through email.
A solution with compromises - Skiff email
If you look for an email provider, there are two options:
- Big tech providers (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, etc.)
- Smaller providers (Proton Mail, Fastmail, Tuta, etc.)
As stated before, I don’t want to use option 1. So I went on a search to find the best smaller email providers. Eventually I found Skiff1. It’s a small company that aims to be a Google Workspace challenger, and I found its free plan to be appealing. They provide everything I wanted.
- 10 GB of space. More than I’ll ever need
- Email aliases
- 1 custom domain
- Very recent addition: PGP support
Skiff’s free plan was too good, to be honest. Custom domain support and email aliases are features that all other email services lock behind a paywall. Skiff allows a free account to use these features, and provides 10 times more storage than a free Proton Mail account gives.
After I made an account, I got my domain connected to Skiff’s email servers. Now I can send stuff using my own domain, even if the real address isn’t hosted on my server. Having my own domain in the address looks great, and I get the reliability of a dedicated email provider. Plus, I don’t have to pay to have access to these features, unlike most other email providers. If I think Skiff provides great value (which they are doing now), then I’ll be happy to pay.
Skiff wants to be like Google Workspace, but also advertises the same features Proton Mail does:
- At-rest encryption
- E2EE when emailing between Skiff accounts
- Better privacy than big tech
- Other software integrations like a calendar and drive
They’ve made a pretty competitive service.
Side benefit: email aliases
Skiff offers a few email aliases for free users, and an unlimited amount on custom domains. This is an incredibly good feature that Proton Mail charges $8 USD/month for. Email aliases are like pseudonyms for your real address, like how a VPN masks your real IP address.
A good privacy advice is to use multiple email addresses to spread your digital fingerprint.
For instance, don’t use john.smith email_symbol gmail.com for everything.
Use john.smith email_symbol outlook.com,
or even better, less identifiable addresses like
zebrapuddles email_symbol gmail.com.
But making and managing multiple email addresses is a chore.
Email aliases fix this by letting you make up a pseudonym for
your real address whenever you want.
Kind of like this:
Your real account, real_address email_symbol skiff.com, is used for eBay and Amazon.
But your eBay account is registered under the pseudonym fake email_symbol xyz.com,
and Amazon uses notme email_symbol xyz.com.
Both of these addresses are just pseudonyms for real_address email_symbol skiff.com,
so you still get the emails in your real account.
But eBay and Amazon can’t see your real address.
Long story short, Skiff provides probably the best free-tier email service. I’m very happy with it and encourage you to try it too. At least it’s better than Gmail and Outlook.
Email is compromised anyways
If I’m privacy-sensitive (way more than the average person at least), isn’t choosing an email provider hypocritical? Skiff is based in the US, which is associated with terms like NSA, Big Tech, Five Eyes, glowies, gag orders, and so on.
If I wore a tinfoil bodysuit and only used OpenBSD on air gapped librebooted ThinkPads, then yes I’m a hypocrite. But I don’t. The most important aspect to communications is reliability; the whole purpose is for people to receive and send information. If the world’s most private and secure communications software was unreliable, I wouldn’t use it.
And besides, email itself is old and insecure. It was never designed to be used on a scale this massive. If you want to send completely private email to someone, you’re doing it wrong because email is fundamentally not private. If you’re going to use email, accept that you should not be sharing information over it that can cause serious liabilities. If you want to be careful, use GPG to encrypt the contents2. But if you’re so stubborn to do this, just use Signal3 or Matrix4 instead and spare the effort.
So anyways, you can now send something to jakemail symbol thinglmbx.me.
Hopefully I won’t have to close this inbox for a long time.