Skiff was a privacy focused email service. I switched over to them a few weeks ago from Proton because I got it recommended to me from someone on campus for their very generous free tier that offered custom domain support. I’ve always wanted to switch to my custom domain for unlimited aliases using it to organize my accounts, and I’m admittantly cheap so I decided “why not” and gave Skiff a try. Honestly didn’t care for their elliptic curve E2EE, zero access, quantum resistant hoo-ha, I just wanted free custom domains with incrementally better privacy than Google even though email sucks. I thought worst case senario I could always just switch back to Proton (my custom domain will keep me email-service agnostic), and Skiff’s massive amount of capital investment would keep them afloat for at least a few years before I would make another switch. I literally just woke up to learn that they’ve been bought out by Notion; indeed I am a clown 🤡. This is sort of on me for being naive to trust this particular service that seemed “a little too good to be true” so take this from my experience, even though it should seem obvious: only trust an email (or any) service that has years of a track record to back it up.

I’m actually somewhat grateful that this happened, because now I get to learn and this was a pretty low stakes mess up in the grand scheme of things. Even though I’ve messed up, I’m humbled, and despite my slight self-deprication I actually am not beating myself up too much over this. For one to avoid being a clown in the future, one must see the clown in their present selves, own up to it, laugh, honk their nose, and then finally remove the wig and makeup.