Skiff Mail (Email Provider)

v53.0 is a lot faster. Also thanks for adding support for multiple accounts.

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Thatā€™s great to hear.

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@amilich do you guys have an endpoint for imap/smtp? I couldnā€™t get skiff to work with custom email clients

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We donā€™t - because emails are end-to-end encrypted, we couldnā€™t easily expose and endpoint without having you run a bridge-type application.

If there are any specific features you want to see in the Skiff web or native clients, let me know.

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Would it be helpful to divide this discussion into two threads for Skiff Mail? One would be to discuss the actual requirements and track whether or how they are met. The other would be to talk about general feedback or questions.

It seems like a lot of the comments being made are concerns that donā€™t tie back to the requirements for being listed on Privacy Guides. As open as the Skiff team has been, I think it would be helpful for them to have clear communication on the requirements specifically and not have the thread bogged down with other criticism, valid or not. At the end of the day, all privacy tools have tradeoffs. Thatā€™s why the PG team has criteria to meet rather than weighing each tool on its own.

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I completely agree.

I believe unequivocally that all the requirements are met. There are a few small good practice changes that could be made - such as tightening up some language in marketing articles, and the remaining points from the internet.nl discussion above, but they are shared by listed email services (Proton/Tuta). So, at this point, I donā€™t know what more is needed.

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Iā€™ve been testing Skiff for quite some time now. And as @Equinox pointed out, I am really impressed by their willingness to keep improving. I am particularly impressed by how much they engage with their users and help them out in the Discord community.

I also donā€™t understand why this thread is being dragged out so much. If Skiff fulfills the criteria, adding them would only be beneficial for all people who care about privacy.

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Hi @jonah and @dngray,

What can we do to help with the open PR to add skiff.com as an email provider? I believe all outstanding issues have been addressed. Please correct me if I am wrong here, and weā€™ll get it addressed.

We really appreciate all the honest feedback from you both and the overall community. It undoubtedly has made Skiff better. We have a few other updates in the coming future that I think will be widely appreciated.

We donā€™t believe that merging this PR will be the end of engaging with this community. We plan to remain active to stay close to our core users and making sure we are delivering a strong privacy product everyday.

If we agree that all criteria is met, can we merge the PR and open a new topic for ongoing discussion? (We think the ongoing conversations and feedback has been overall productive and weā€™d like to continue; however, I want to make sure that the core concerns related to listing are addressed.)

Thanks for the consideration!

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Also, weā€™ve now open-sourced and published skiff-crypto and skiff-ui (MIT licensed)

Really would appreciate some input from the PG team to understand whatā€™s going on with the open PR.

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Wow ! Great Job Andrew :clap:

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Hey all - want to keep this thread alive and still waiting on any updates to understand whatā€™s going on. Here are a few more changes on the Skiff side

Any further questions for the Skiff team?

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When we will get a skiff mail app in linux and make it native using gtk4 or qt and support for snap and flatpak is very important whether you have .rpm and .Deb. Please do it soon. Love your app and after protonmail i find skiff is the second most attractive and good looking mail service with security enabled.
And is there a plan to upgrade to pq crypo in future.

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Any suggestions for making Skiff even better? We definitely have a lot of requests for a Linux app (here is our feature request board, BTW - Skiff Feature Requests | Skiff), so thatā€™s already something we are thinking about actively.

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Auto-sending read items to trash after a certain period of time, as well as an option to auto-clear trash after the chosen period of time would be useful for keeping inboxes de-cluttered as well as for a privacy benefit.

Ideally, there could also be an option to whitelist certain emails from this.

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Does anyone from the PG team want to do a Jitsi/Discord/Signal call and discuss any criteria that weā€™re still missing? Would love to know what the status is so we can keep the thread moving and make sure we are on the right track.

Iā€™m available at andrew@skiff.com or happy to set a time in the thread and have community members join too.

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I just read through this entire thread. I have nothing to contribute to the technical discussion.

I wasnā€™t particularly familiar with Skiff beyond the name/basics before this thread, and I havenā€™t used or tested Skiff and I donā€™t really have a personal interest or strong opinion on the topic.

But I just wanted to chime in to say that after reading through this conversation, I respect you and your teamā€™s continued willingness to engage in good faith and in the open, and the receptiveness to constructive criticism, considering that I am certain this conversation has at times been exasperating and possibly disheartening.

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So looks like the major things have been fixed:

  1. I was able to export a whole folder of emails not one by one. A zip file was produced with all the .eml messages.

  2. Using recovery email only for recovery only seems to also be resolved for new accounts so that looks good.

  3. It does not appear that SES is being used as a backup anymore either, which is good.

  4. The transparency page at least now makes some mention of the audits and when they took place. I assume the issue with providing them, or a letter of attestation is that it needed to be negotiated when the audit took place which is now not possible. An extra column there in that table perhaps describing the scope should be possible though.

  5. Now that source code has been released we can also mention that too. @amilich I think it would be a good idea to produce a blog article on that. Youā€™ve mentioned it in the marketing email with a link to @skiff-org/skiff-crypto - npm. For major announcements like that Iā€™d probably always make sure thereā€™s some mention of it on the blog.

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We are currently looking over everything once again. It is looking good so far. We will post the decision in a few days.

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Awesome, thank you! Please let me know if you have any additional feedback. On the Skiff Mail source code, weā€™re working on the same developments of putting up a Code Sandbox, making the repo easy to run (itā€™s not easy to run right now), putting up NPM packages for parts or all of it (like the editor), and then blog.

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Again, happy to keep working on any part that you think would be helpful. Iā€™ve only been posting to know what more we should do to improve.

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