Today, Skiff Mail launches: Privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted, open-source, Web3-native email.

Skiff Mail is built to be the next generation of email. Since the mid 1990s, email has brought an unprecedented degree of collaboration to the world - allowing scientists to share research, families to stay in touch, and the professional world to function.

Yet even as email has been adopted by billions of individuals, most large mail providers still have woeful privacy protections — allowing users’ messages to be read, processed, and stored by third parties.

Skiff Mail shifts the paradigm with simple and intuitive privacy. Skiff never stores unencrypted copies of any messages sent on Skiff Mail - and every Skiff-to-Skiff messages is end-to-end encrypted. Sign up, log in, and every message you send is owned by you.

Privacy applies beyond messages sent to and from Skiff Mail. Every message received from an external, third-party mail provider is immediately encrypted - ensuring only users have access to unencrypted copies of their emails.

Open-sourcing has always been a central piece of our strategy at Skiff, allowing us to build trust with our community and deliver transparent and trustworthy privacy. This is why we have decided to open-source the entire Skiff Mail product on launch. Visit 

Skiff Mail is also Web3 native. Sign up for Mail with a crypto wallet (currently MetaMask and soon Brave Wallet) to collaborate while completely owning your data. Just like Skiff's Workspace product, users have the option to store data on Protocol Labs' decentralized storage network IPFS, and also to send emails to/from their ENS addresses.

To use Skiff Mail, sign up for a Skiff account at 

Skiff Mail features instant, privacy-preserving search. Full text search has been a key feature in Skiff’s collaboration platform - allowing you to search through workspaces containing thousands of files instantly. We have brought this search function to Skiff Mail, allowing for message, subject, to/from/cc search, and more. Skiff’s search is completely open source - read more about Skiff search on 

Mobile and desktop apps for sending, receiving, and notifications are crucial for using email. Skiff Mail launches with fully featured mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as a fully featured macOS desktop app. Check them out below:

Skiff Mail lets you sign in, send, and receive mail using a crypto wallet. For the first time, send directly to an ENS address using Skiff. Read more about our wallet integration on Skiff’s 

Every Skiff Mail user receives 10 GB of free storage to send and receive mail and attachments. As we transition out of Skiff Mail Alpha into future versions, we’ll support additional storage and paid plans.

Introducing Skiff Mail

We’re excited to announce that Skiff Mail’s entire client code – including web, iOS, Android, and Desktop apps – will be completely open source at 

Starting today at launch, anyone will be able to check out the product codebase - understanding and ensuring how all data on Skiff Mail is completely end-to-end encrypted before ever leaving your device. We’ve also updated our 

 to provide a detailed overview of Skiff Mail’s technical architecture and underlying cryptographic protocols.

We have been committed to open source software since the very beginning of Skiff. We strongly believe that privacy cannot be just a promise; software must be available for anyone to independently audit and validate.

In addition to Skiff Mail, we’ve already open sourced our component library (

 Skiff as our ecosystem of products grows.

As developers, we love working closely with the open source community. You can join our 

 to submit questions, suggest contributions, or just share what you’re working on. We will also be regularly updating the 

 repo to stay in-sync with the live version of the app.

Skiff Mail is Open Source

Today, we’re releasing Embeds - a new way to share any type of file with the security of end-to-end encryption.

Now, you can drag and drop any file — from audio to video to GIF’s — into a page on Skiff. Furthermore, if you enable decentralized storage in your 

, your embedded files will be decentralized and stored on 

To start, drag-and-drop a file into the Skiff page you want it to appear in. You’ll see a progress indicator as your file is end-to-end encrypted and embedded.

If your enable decentralized storage on IPFS, you’ll see a cube indicator linking to the data’s 

 (CID) and its encryption key. Just like all data on Skiff, everything uploaded to IPFS is end-to-end encrypted.

We’ll be covering embeds in our next office hours and newsletter. In the meantime, if you have any questions, join the conversation on our 

File embeds: Upload any file to Skiff

Power users are like people who are constantly playing a game of 'hot lava' where everything but the keyboard is lava — if their hands ever have to leave the keyboard, they die.

Skiff supports an ever-growing list of keyboard shortcuts that are designed to make power users feel right at home. Read on to learn about the most essential time-saving shortcuts.

Slash commands were first popularized by IRC (Internet Relay Chat) enabling users to execute commands as easily as they could send messages. A few examples are /join #channelname to join a specific channel or /msg nickname to start a private chat with someone.

IRC has steadily declined in popularity since its peak in 2003. Since then, other popular messaging and productivity tools, notably including Slack, have picked up the feature and brought it to a new generation of power users.

On Skiff, you can type / anytime to reveal a list of commands to modify their current page. Slash commands are searchable. For example, starting to type /Table will quickly filter available commands and prompt you with the option to insert a Table. Similarly, /Subpage , /Heading , /Todo list , insert just what you’d expect. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, scroll up and down the list using arrow keys to discover all the possible commands.

If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.

With Skiff, looping in your collaborators is as easy as typing the @ character, making group efforts just as fast as solo missions. Use the @ mention feature to mention a collaborator or mention a page.

When you mention a collaborator, they’ll receive a notification that will let them quickly jump into the document you’re referencing. When mentioning a page, a handy in-line link is created, making it easy to tie documents together even if they aren’t in the same hierarchical structure.

Together, both types of mentions make it straightforward to keep everyone on the same … 

 … page and to keep as much of your communication as possible contained to one platform. Mentions mean there’s no need to message a teammate a link to your document or copy-paste content from one platform to another — it’s an efficient, private and secure way to work.

The Quick Actions menu lets you search and interact with your entire Workspace at lightning speed. Either click the Search button in the left sidebar or hit Cmd + p to open the quick actions menu. This allows you to search, create a new page or folder, upload files, open settings, or re-open recently modified documents all without leaving the active page.

Some people cover their desk with drafts, research, and sticky notes. Others like to brainstorm on a whiteboard (real or virtual). In the age of digital collaboration, a lot of us like to open tons of tabs and switch between them all day long.

For the tab lovers out there, we’re here for you. Open any page in a new tab with cmd + left click . Keep everything you need within one click by opening as many Skiff tabs as your heart desires.

Skiff shortcuts

: the barriers that prevent people from switching from one product to another. Sometimes switching costs are by design — think cancellation fees — and sometimes they arise naturally, such as when people are simply reluctant to invest time and energy into learning the ins-and-outs of a new product, even a superior one.

In the world of online privacy, switching costs make a big difference. Take Google Drive as an example: Many people realize that it doesn’t make sense to store all of their private documents on a platform owned by a company whose business model hinges on selling hyper-targeted ads — a company whose 

 resulted in the leak of the personal data of 52 million users of Google+. And yet, Google Drive reportedly accounts for roughly 35% of the the file-hosting market.

People unconcerned with their online privacy and data autonomy may have legitimate reasons for preferring Google Drive, but for a substantial group of users, what keeps them from jumping ship to a privacy-respecting product like Skiff is a perceived switching cost. If you’re anything like us, you’ve likely been slowly accumulating files on Google Drive for about a decade — sorting and porting gigabytes of files over to another platform sounds like a giant headache that’s probably somewhere just behind “reading up on the tax code” on your priority list.

At Skiff, we’ve got a pretty simple philosophy: We think people shouldn’t have to choose between privacy and laziness. We want our online lives to be private 

, with zero additional thought or effort needed — the same way that everything in your own home is private by default, even when you’re just enjoying a lazy afternoon on the couch and not, you know, actively preventing Google from 

That philosophy is why everything you do on Skiff is end-to-end encrypted. There’s no setting to toggle. Privacy isn’t optional. Skiff is completely private from the first time you use it and no one but you can ever access your data — not even Skiff.

But we still had a problem to solve: switching costs. How could we make it easy for people to get gigabytes of data off of an anti-privacy platform like Google Drive onto a privacy-respecting, end-to-end encrypted, lazy-person-friendly platform like Skiff?

The answer was obvious — to us and everyone else — which is why it became our most-requested feature ever. We needed to give you the option to click a single button to transfer all of your Google Docs onto Skiff and then never think about it again. So that’s what we did.

Skiff’s new import feature couldn’t be simpler. To use it:

Hit the upload button and select “Import from drive”

Authenticate your Google account and you’re done

From Skiff’s perspective, there’s some interesting stuff going on under the hood that makes sure 

privacy-respecting password-reset process

, we needed to ensure that document import never compromised end-to-end encryption. Any process that required Skiff to gain access to your documents would break end-to-end encryption and defeat the whole purpose.

We solved this by encrypting all of your documents locally before they’re ever uploaded to Skiff. So the process looks like this:

1. You download your own documents from Google Drive

2. These docs are encrypted locally on your own device before they’re ever transmitted over a network

3. Then they’re uploaded to Skiff and safely stored with the rest of your end-to-end encrypted data

So that’s it. As switching costs go, moving from Google Drive to Skiff is about as cheap as it gets.


We have also recently rolled out comprehensive file storage on Skiff. Simply drag and drop any file, no matter what file type, onto a Skiff page and your file will be embedded for future easy access.

If IPFS is enabled on your account, all your embedded files will automatically be stored on IPFS and fully decentralized.

We’re also planning to introduce import features for more file-hosting services in the future. If you have any requests or ideas on how we can better support your online privacy, 

How to (Privately) Switch from Google Drive to Skiff

 to announce that we’re furthering Skiff’s mission to make collaboration usable, private, and decentralized with the completion of a $10.5 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

Our Series A followed a $4.2 million seed round, also led by Sequoia. We’re incredibly excited to welcome a diverse group of angel investors with deep expertise in the domains of privacy and decentralization: John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Gaby Goldberg, a crypto investor at TCG, and Albert Ni, from Dropbox and the Ethereum Foundation.

“Our digital lives should be as private as our physical lives. Recent events underscore the importance of products that are fully private and where users own their own data,” said Konstantine Buhler, partner at Sequoia. “Skiff is building an amazing team and visionary products to lead this moment. We couldn’t be more excited to double down.”

Skiff offers a completely private, end-to-end encrypted workspace ideal for teams that want full control over their own data. Everything from building a personal knowledge base to writing collaborative meeting notes is done in complete privacy. No one, not even Skiff, can ever see the title, content, or description of a user’s document.

In addition to end-to-end encryption of all their data, Skiff users have the option to leverage the fully decentralized Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Account creation and document sharing can also be completed using a decentralized, self-managed crypto identity, such as an Ethereum wallet.

Skiff is actively recruiting talented people who are motivated to help bring about our vision of secure, private, decentralized collaboration. See our current openings and reach out to us at hello@skiff.org. For privacy-focused teams, email us at hello@skiff.org or sign up directly at app.skiff.org.

Skiff raises $10.5 million Series A

At Skiff, we’re not satisfied with the way the internet works right now.

 We want to live in a world where our digital lives are as private as our physical lives.

, a new way to reward people who are working to make not only their own but also other’s digital lives more private and secure.

Skiff Credits are simple: We reward you with credits that can be put toward a Skiff Pro plan when you carry out steps like inviting a friend to join you on Skiff or importing documents from Google Docs.

We want all our users to experience the capabilities of the Skiff platform to its fullest, and there’s no better way to do that then with a Skiff Pro plan. Skiff Credits can help you unlock the full range of our most powerful features on Pro.

At the moment, there are two ways you can earn Skiff credits:

Invite friends to sign up and create a Skiff account

Earning credits by inviting friends to sign up for Skiff

Skiff is better with friends. Not only does inviting your friends mean more people to collaborate with, but it will also earn you a hefty sum of Skiff Credits. For every friend that signs up, both you AND them will be rewarded with a whopping $10 in Skiff Credits — that’s enough for both of you to get a full month of Skiff Pro access.

You can earn credits for up to six invites (for a total of $60), meaning that you can easily get a cool half year of Skiff Pro access by bringing privacy to your friends and coworkers.

Earning credits by importing from Google Docs

Switching to a new platform can seem daunting, but Skiff makes it ridiculously easy to port over documents from Google Docs — it’s just one button. No matter how little effort it takes, we still want to reward people who recognize the importance of making their workspace and their data more private.

So we’re giving Skiff Credits to users who import files from Google Docs. Each doc you import will earn you $1 in Skiff Credits, up to a maximum of $15.

To make the switch and claim your credits, just hit the upload button on your Skiff dashboard and you’ll see the option to import files from Google Docs.

You can pop over to the settings page and check how many credits you’ve earned anytime. The credits you see here are the one's that haven't been applied, so don't worry if you don't see your recently applied credits in this balance.

Once you’ve saved up some Skiff Credits, you can apply them to a new (or existing) Pro subscription. Pro subscriptions unlock the full power of Skiff, with additional storage capacity, decentralized file storage, full text search, and more.

Stripe’s customer credit balance system

. When you hit the apply button we’ll pass your credits to Stripe and they will take care of the rest.

 to allow users to seamlessly and securely pay for Skiff Pro with cryptocurrency. Currently, Skiff Credits can’t be applied to a subscription paid for with Ethereum, Bitcoin, or USDC. However, we’ll be rolling this feature out soon.

Skiff Credits

 out a new design for Pages (FKA documents) on Skiff. As tens of thousands of individuals and teams have signed up to use Skiff, we’ve received thousands of feature ideas and support requests via our 

. Many of these requests center on the same theme: making it easier to find and organize your information on Skiff.

Now, pages are structured with three new features: Titles, icons, and descriptions.

New page titles synchronize with your dashboard and file tree, making it easier for you to organize, find, and share pages in your workspace.

Icons enable creative customization for every page in Skiff. Click the icon at the top of every page (or to the left of page titles in the sidebar) to customize the page icon. Choose the icon and color that best fit your work.

Optional page descriptions provide additional context and information. To edit a page description, select the page’s title, and an area for description text will open. From there, add any relevant information, context, or descriptors to the page.

Comments or questions? Join our Discord here → 

New page design

Today, we’re rolling out Skiff Workspaces

, a new way to simply and securely manage your team’s collaboration.

Skiff Workspaces are end-to-end encrypted collaboration spaces that allow you to organize your work around teams, projects, or topics.

If you’ve used Slack, then you already know what workspaces are all about. They promote knowledge-sharing across an organization and allow you to group collaborators into specialized teams and focus areas.

But the Slack comparison only goes so far. 

Workspaces are distinguished by being completely end-to-end encrypted

, meaning that control of your data is always in your hands.

Skiff Workspaces are organized around teams. You can create a team for anything — engineering, sales, a new product launch, or (dank) memes.

When you create a team, you have the option to make it accessible to everyone within a workspace, or to make it invite-only, which limits all the Pages within that team to designated collaborators. 

Use invite-only teams when you want to keep information on a need-to-know basis.

Admins of Skiff Workspaces have granular control over team membership and permissions. They can control individual access levels and assign roles, including editors, viewers and additional admins.

Workspaces are private from the ground up

Your team’s data is valuable. Unlike other collaboration platforms, on Skiff, you truly own it. 

End-to-end encryption, granular admin controls, and optional

 mean that no one — not even Skiff — ever has access to any of the data in your workspace unless you choose to share it with them.

Skiff Workspaces are for anyone who collaborates online and cares about the security of their data. Entrepreneurs, crypto protocol teams, media organizations, nonprofits, and investment firms all use Skiff to maintain data autonomy and boost the productivity and peace of mind of their remote teams.

Ready to create a Skiff Workspace and start collaborating privately?

If you sign up during our beta period, we’ll give you 

Sign into Skiff to create and invite your team members to your very own Skiff Workspace.

Introducing Skiff Workspaces

Today, we’re excited to announce that Skiff users can pay for Skiff Pro with cryptocurrency — quickly, privately, and securely from any of their Skiff workspaces.

 to design a seamless, reliable, and privacy-respecting crypto-payment system. Skiff users can now make purchases using a wallet of their choice (including MetaMask, Ledger, Rainbow, and more), or using their Coinbase account.

Today, BTC, ETH, and USDC are supported, with more coming soon.

From your Skiff dashboard, click on the Settings page, and select the “Plans” tab (or directly visit 

). From there, you’ll see an option to “Pay with crypto.”

From there, it’s simple! Choose to check out with your Coinbase account or the wallet and cryptocurrency of your choice. If not using a Coinbase account, scan the provided QR code with your wallet, and confirm the transaction.

Once the transaction is submitted, you’ll see your account upgraded to Skiff Pro.

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