Wow. That was very short lived and disapointing. Skiff is dead. Long live Protonmail.
Previously, I talked about how I finally started to use my domain to send and receive emails by using Skiff (RIP). This was an open source startup that competed with Google Workspace and Protonmail. They provided E2EE email, a cloud drive, and other services (I only used them for email). Skiff was very new on the market, just about 2 years old, but they were improving quickly; their software was becoming more polished and feature-rich. Their free plan offered premium features that other platforms charge a subscription for. I thought Skiff was a good alternative to services like Protonmail and started using it about 2 months ago.
Everything was good, until just a few days ago. Skiff was sold out to some bigger company and their services are being sunsetted in 6 months. The announcement came out of nowhere and suddenly everything fell into chaos. The Skiff subreddit (yes, really) went into lockdown, their Discord server (lmao) shut down, and all I had was an email that reeks of corporate speech.
All I can say is GG at this point. If Skiff always intended on cashing out by an acquisition, they did a great sneak attack.
Luckily I had an easy time moving away from Skiff, since all of my email addresses now use my domain. I just need to find an email service provider with custom domain support and change some DNS records. Custom domains makes it very easy to transfer between email providers and this is a really powerful advantage over generic Gmail. It’s just sad I get to recognize this advantage because I was an email refugee.
After closing my Skiff account, I settled for Protonmail. I was always on their free plan, but now I need their paid plan to maintain custom domain support. Which means, yes, I’m paying for email. Probably way less familiar to most people than paying for streaming videos, but I find more value in email honestly.
So that’s the story. My email provider decides to commit suicide so I started paying for Protonmail. What a fun series of events. Really makes me trust that businesses will actually offer good things to customers.