A new email, notepad, and file space service in the cloud is now available. The best part of Skiff is that everything is automatically encrypted. Skiff gives you the power to take your thoughts and ideas to the next level and to communicate freely.
Nobody spies on your email (are the folks who supply GMail paying attention to this?) If someone attempts to access your files stored in Skiff’s cloud-based file storage service, they won’t be able to read the files because everything is encrypted.
Best of all, you don’t have to pay a thing to use Skiff for end-to-end encrypted email, file sharing, and collaboration. (That includes limited file storage space. Obtaining addition file storage space requires payment.) It’s also very easy to use, but includes advanced features for the technically inclined.
You probably understand that using a popular free email service like Gmail means you pay by losing a degree of privacy. But have you thought about the risks of using cloud storage or collaboration from the same corporate sources? The developers of Skiff started with an encrypted collaboration solution as a private alternative, then expanded to secure file storage and sharing, and finally added encrypted email.
The Skiff team hopes this combination of secure email, file sharing, and collaboration will be attractive enough to wean users off of Google and other large public entities. Using Skiff’s impressive combination of free email encryption, private collaboration, and secure file sharing, you’ll make a major step toward taking back your privacy.
Skiff offers apps for Macintosh, Android, and Apple’s iOS. The company expects to soon bring out a Linux application. There is no announced plan to ever bring out a version for Windows.
By default, your secure files and email messages reside on Skiff’s secure servers. Communication between those servers and your local app are end-to-end encrypted. But those who like to live on the cutting edge can opt for storage in the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS)(Opens in a new window), a distributed secure storage system that’s independent of Skiff. Rather than going to a central server, files stored in the IPFS get broken into chunks, encrypted, and pushed out to different nodes in the IPFS system hosted on multiple servers all around the globe.
The biggest disadvantages of Skiff in my opinion is the lack of a Windows client and the fact that both the email sender and the recipient must be using Skiff in order to send and receive messages.
If you don’t want spying eyes to monitor your communications, you might want to check out Skiff.
Other encrypted data services include Proton (Mail, Drive, and VPN), Tutanota, StartMail, Private-Mail, SecureMyMail, PreVeil, Hushmail, CounterMail, Runbox, Mailfence, Posteo, Mailbox, Zoho Mail, and others.
You can learn more about Skiff at https://skiff.com/ as well as in series of YouTube videos at: https://youtu.be/tGaIofzrRDc.