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Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

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Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#101

Post by bowsamic »

autoexec wrote: post #86
bowsamic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a failure though. Getting bought out by a larger company is literally the aim of most startups

I hope you're wrong, but perhaps you're not and instead of "make something useful and/or new for people" startups just want to make something threatening enough to be destroyed or at best scraped for parts by a larger company so long as they get a payout.

I’m confused, this is the openly stated goal of most tech startups. They aim to be acquired and therefore make a huge profit for the founders. That’s their entire business model: build the product and sell it to a bigger company

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#102

Post by dantondwa »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #10
dantondwa wrote: post #5

They’re just closing it, wow. 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.

May I suggest something to think over, what about -- “Can I walk out of this, and migrate elsewhere and how complex/hard will be that migration?” instead of the blanket VC-Funded or not. My thoughts.

You’re right. I should discriminate between the seriousness of the tool. A non-essential service can be easily replaced when eventually they enshittify it. Email is an essential one, and reliability is the most important factor.

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#103

Post by superultra »

I’m still miffed that Dropbox killed Mailbox.

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.

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#104

Post by b0afc375b5 »

Sorry for the newb question, I have a custom domain and have set up MX records, etc., to point to skiff.

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?

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#106

Post by throwuxiytayq »

jayveeone wrote: post #30
gia_ferrari wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what's the news on Proton?

Four people mentioned proton in this thread without any indication of what happened lol

Proton is perfectly fine and as secure as email gets. I would think there is some sort of a FUD campaign going on against them, if I didn’t believe that people are dumb enough to endlessly spout bullshit on topics they know nothing about without external motivation.

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#107

Post by Nyr »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #104

Sorry for the newb question, I have a custom domain and have set up MX records, etc., to point to skiff. 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 change the MX records to point to the new provider. No downtime.

You also need to take care of SPF / DKIM / DMARC, but those records are for outbound mail.

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#108

Post by NoboruWataya »

Wow, I was looking around for a cheap email provider lately for a secondary account and Skiff seemed to be the only one to offer everything I was looking for on their free plan. Almost seemed to good to be true - so I concluded it probably was and went with a more expensive but trusted option. Glad I did.

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.

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#109

Post by c0balt »

dig1 wrote: post #95
zer00eyz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running mail is hard. 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.

Running mail isn't hard if you know a few bits about how things work. As a matter of fact, if correctly set, it can be left running for years without significant time investment. But I'm getting the impression that anything that can't be set in 2 clicks is hard for a particular HN crowd.

The setup of a mail server is not very hard. An intermediate to beginner admin can do it.

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.

Re: Privacy focused platform Skiff is joining Notion, Skiff to be sunset

#110

Post by jillesvangurp »

dcow wrote: post #56

Why would Notion shut down the email provider product? I understand sunsetting drive and rolling pages and calendar into Notion and Cron, respectively. But it would be pretty awesome if Notion had an email service. There’s nothing out there that’s as easy as Google Workspace (not even Proton’s suite—I use it personally) and I’d use Notion-plus-Skiff-and-Cron over Google Workspace any day. Huge miss…

For the same reason that Skiff is being acquihired: it has simply proven to not be a viable business.

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.

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