Update Skiff is shutting down

[Imran]

In a sad turn of events, Skiff will be closing their services and joining with Notion.

In a major surprise, end-to-end encrypted service provider Skiff has announced that they will be merging with Notion and that their services will be closing in a period of 6 months. This is sad news for the privacy community as having more options for secure encrypted communication is always a positive for growth, competition, and innovation. We wish everyone at the Skiff Team much success in their future work and we look forward to seeing what else they have in store.


In any ecosystem, be it in the natural or digital world, diversity of species plays a key role in its health and stability. In a rather shocking announcement made at the end of last week, Skiff began notifying their customers and the wider privacy community that they will be shutting their services down in six short months. In the public statement made on their main website landing page, Skiff informed the world that they will be merging with Notion, a popular cloud-based notetaking application. 

A recent player in the privacy and encryption space, Skiff first launched their project in 2022 and it quickly grew in popularity. At this time the full conditions of this merger have not been made public, but this news came as a shock to the millions of users who made Skiff their digital home.

More Services are always better
When it comes to privacy and security, many people speak about points-of-failure. In this context, what they are specifically referring to is that when you create your own security model, it is important not to rely too heavily on a single point because if it breaks, or you lose access, your entire model will lose its strength and integrity. 

For this reason, we are sorry to see the Skiff Team closing their doors. When customers and privacy advocates have more options for choosing where and how they wish to protect their data, everyone is better off. It is a best practice to avoiding keeping all your eggs in a single basket and with Skiff shutting down, the pool of encrypted email providers grows thinner. Healthy competition between providers pushes all of us to work harder and create even better, more secure software.

Standing up to Big Tech is hard, and the team at Skiff can be proud of what they accomplished in the fight for privacy.

https://tuta.com/blog/skiff-shutdown