Skiff Mail has been open-source since day one, and our engineering team has been hard at work to release changes that make it easier to run and contribute to Skiff Mail's web app. Now, anyone can contribute to Skiff's development - simply push up a pull request if you have a creative idea, feature suggestion, or bug fix.

To try out Skiff Mail immediately in your web browser, visit the code sandbox below:

https://codesandbox.io/p/github/skiff-org/skiff-apps/main

You can run, edit, and experiment with Skiff Mail all inside the Code Sandbox. However, local development (see instructions below) will likely be much faster if you intend to make larger changes.

Our process of creating a buildable version of Skiff Mail started from an 

, working in public encourages our users to not just trust us, but verify our code for themselves.

 - our cryptography and UI libraries - as MIT-licensed NPM packages for anyone to use. We’ve been appreciative of the tremendous response this has received from the Skiff community.

With this update, we hope to unlock the creativity and energy of our community - if you want to make a change to Skiff Mail or fix a bug, you can now do so immediately.

As an example, here’s Skiff Mail in “homebrew”-style colors, with the source code available on the 

Here’s what we recommend to get started in contributing to Skiff Mail.

Set up a development environment and run Skiff Mail locally. You can either follow instructions for local development in the 

, or edit directly in the cloud using our 

 section within the repository, and assign yourself if anything looks interesting. This is the fun part of tinkering with our codebase and solving an interesting technical problem.

When you’ve made your change, create a pull request with our 

, and assign someone from the Skiff team to review!

Once your pull request is approved, you’re all cleared to merge. 🚀

A: For now, we decided to mock most API calls and authentication for simplicity and reliability. In the future, we may consider offering a hosted API - please email us at 

 if you’re interested in being a beta tester for this.

A: There are not financial bounties yet, but we’re offering a year of the Essential Plan to anyone who closes a “good first issue.”

A: Yes! Any PR that is merged and goes through a design review will be released to the entire Skiff community, which is now over one million users.

Skiff’s community is full of enthusiasts who care deeply about open-source software, privacy, and freedom. Feel free to join our 

 for daily updates. If you have feature requests, you can also add them to our public feature 

. If you want to contribute, we hope this guide was helpful!

Contribute to Skiff Mail

Skiff Mail is now a recommended email provider on PrivacyGuides’ privacy-first email services. This milestone comes after months of major product updates, including the ability to add hardware security keys, new mobile apps, open-source updates, and positive reviews throughout the media and other product guides.

Skiff Mail is now widely recommended by privacy and security advocates. This includes recommendations on:

, where Skiff received the Editor’s Choice award

PrivacyGuides.org is a non-profit, free-to-use website that provides information for protecting your personal security and privacy across all areas of technology.

The website offers a variety of resources, including:

 These provide detailed instructions on how to protect your privacy with specific online services, such as email, browsers, and VPNs.

 These list the best privacy-focused tools and services for different categories, such as email, browsers, and VPNs (this list now includes Skiff!).

 This forum allows users to discuss privacy-related topics and share tips and tricks.

PrivacyGuides.org is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn more about online privacy and how to protect personal data and privacy.

At Skiff, privacy is the basis of everything we do. From blocking email trackers and supporting Yubikeys, to end-to-end encryption of all sensitive information, Skiff is built to protect your privacy.

To learn more about how our products work, consider exploring:

, which includes detailed diagrams and a comprehensive breakdown of how we integrate end-to-end encryption into all Skiff products.

Our comprehensive and annotated privacy policy

 elucidates how Skiff safeguards your data as a product and a company (you can register, upgrade, and utilize Skiff without divulging any personal details, and Skiff does not even collect IP logs of user activity!).

, including Skiff Mail, our user interface library, and our cryptography library.

Support from the privacy and security communities helps amplify our message to like-minded users and make Skiff products even better. Over the coming months, we’ll have numerous more updates to the Skiff product suite, and we’re excited to see even more enthusiasm from our communities. See below for more information on being involved with Skiff’s online communities and guiding our development process.

If you want to be more involved in the Skiff community, check us out on 

Skiff is on PrivacyGuides

Skiff’s privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted products - Skiff Mail, Skiff Pages, Skiff Drive, and Skiff Calendar - are now recommended on PrivacyTools.io, an independent guide for finding privacy-first products that advance your digital security and privacy.

: Our end-to-end encrypted email service - Skiff Mail - ensures your conversations remain private and accessible only to you. Custom domains, email aliases, and tracker protection add even more layers of security

: Skiff Pages is a simple, secure, and powerful product for secure document creation, real-time collaboration, and sharing for notes, wikis, documents, and more.

: Skiff Drive provides private, end-to-end encrypted, cloud-accessible storage for your files. Easily share, preview, or link to files with total privacy.

: Our newest product - Skiff Calendar - enables you to manage your schedule privately, protecting your calendar events with end-to-end encryption.

PrivacyTools is a valuable resource for any internet user looking to replace invasive, anti-privacy products with more private and secure alternatives. From email and collaboration software to browsers and VPNs, PrivacyTools contains critical advice and product reviews for privacy-seeking internet users.

Learning more about privacy and security at Skiff

Privacy is the heart of everything we do at Skiff. For more information, check out:

, including diagrams and a breakdown of how every Skiff product leverages end-to-end encryption.

, explaining how Skiff as a product and company protect your data (you can sign up, upgrade, and use Skiff without sharing 

, including Skiff Mail, our UI library, and our cryptography library.

If you have questions, want to give feature suggestions, or are looking for product updates, check us out on 

Skiff is on PrivacyTools

Skiff UI, our open-source, MIT-licensed React component library that we use for all Skiff products - is now released 

! Skiff UI covers our entire design system integrated into 

 because we need a powerful, customizable, and simple library for our privacy-first application. Our component library makes building high-performance, visually appealing web applications using React easier than ever.

Skiff UI was built for beautiful, user-friendly, and performant user interfaces. This includes components for banners, buttons, dropdowns, avatars, and text. More complex components include facepiles (collections of avatars), progress indicators, and button groups.

Then, you can import components in your React app. Note that Skiff UI is written in TypeScript, meaning you will get full type definitions out of the box:

Community-driven, MIT-licensed, and fully open-source

Open sourcing is a huge part of what we do at Skiff. Skiff Mail has been open-source since it launched, and we’ve recently MIT licensed our cryptography library 

. Skiff Crypto powers all the cryptography inside Skiff’s end-to-end encrypted workspace, including generating keypairs, deriving keys, and performing symmetric or public-key authenticated encryption.

We’ve published a thorough documentation site 

 with code samples, a getting started guide, and examples of every component in Skiff UI.

. If you’re looking to explore other open-source libraries, check out 

You can also write to us at  or open a GitHub pull request!

skiff-ui is open-source

 - Skiff’s cryptography library for symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and object versioning - is now open source and MIT licensed!

From powering end-to-end encryption to managing object structure and versioning, 

 provides a simple and powerful interface for performing cryptography in JavaScript/TypeScript, both in Node.JS and in the browser.

The library is published with full TypeScript types, an interface for generating public/private keypairs, and convenient functions for encrypting and decrypting strings.

 library can be installed easily via both yarn and npm.

Below is a simple demonstration of how to use the Skiff-Crypto library.

Please note that the example code above is a very simple demonstration of how 

 works and what it can do. For a deeper understanding of the library, its full capabilities, and best practices, we recommend that you delve into the documentation.

We're excited to see what you'll build with 

 ! We welcome your contributions and feedback. Together, let's continue to build more powerful, intuitive, and accessible applications.

Write to us at support@skiff.org with any questions, comments, or feedback. You can also post a 

skiff-crypto is open-source and MIT licensed

Email security: Critical for your identity, privacy, and freedom

Privacy was the heart of our conversation with Watchman: Does privacy exist in email? What is encrypted email? How does email tracking work?

Highlighting the ease at which hackers can intercept unsecured emails, we covered the ideological and practical needs for improved email security systems.

Email is our identity online and protecting our inbox means protecting our life. Even more than that, new technology - better and faster encryption, decentralized storage, and broader privacy awareness - has made encrypted email more appealing to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a method of secure communication that anyone except the sender and recipient from accessing data. In the context of email end-to-end encryption, email bodies, subject, and other data can be E2EE. 

However, note that Skiff is one of very few email providers that end-to-end encrypts 

We pointed out that implementing E2EE in email communication is not just a matter of providing better security; it is about building a platform for trust and integrity. E2EE email providers cannot read any user emails, while mainstream email services - Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook - can. 

A key takeaway from the podcast was the importance of privacy in our digital world. As our CEO discussed with Gabriel, it's not just about protecting data from malicious actors, but it's also about empowering individuals to have control over their personal information.

Better data privacy laws, which are designed to protect users' digital privacy, play a role in establishing public confidence and ensuring corporate compliance.

Watchman Privacy is an excellent resource for bringing to the forefront the critical issues of personal privacy, email security, and encryption. As we move deeper into the digital era, we hope you learn more about how to cultivate great personal privacy practices.

Email privacy: Our interview with Watchman Privacy

On April 3rd, Hosting Advice published an interview with our Director of Security, 

, on how Skiff pushes the envelope in providing end-to-end encrypted, privacy-preserving products. Skiff offers four products - Pages, Drive, Calendar, and Mail - for end-to-end encrypted collaboration and communication. Skiff is continuing to make privacy-preserving advancements, from end-to-end encrypted real-time collaboration to client-side search algorithms, to improve the next generation worksuite.

Today, individual users can take advantage of our collaboration suite for free or gain access to custom domains and additional storage on our Essential plan for just $3/month. For teams, Skiff products offer a feature-complete solution to the Google and Microsoft style productivity suites for communicating and collaborating on Pro and Business Plans.

Larger teams can also take advantage of custom domains, shared teams, and shared links for collaborating externally. We also launched 

 with Pro and Business tiers for individuals, families, and teams. Skiff’s paid tiers offer more storage space (up to one terabyte per user), extra email aliases (up to fifteen per user), additional version history, and shorter email aliases.

To learn more about how Skiff works, check out our technical whitepaper at 

. Our whitepaper details technical specifications of how end-to-end encryption protects your data across all Skiff products.

If you’re looking to learn about how Skiff does real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption - an industry first - check out 

. We also wrote a detailed technical blog on how Skiff performs 

 over your data - keeping it private at all times.

, allowing others to review and inspect the product codebase. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

 to ask questions, propose new features, or try out beta releases early.

Total Privacy - No Ph.D. Required

On April 1, 2020, Skiff was founded to build completely private yet uncompromisingly simple products. Today, three years later, we’re blown away by our community’s support, excited by product adoption, and determined to build even better products ahead.

In 2020 and 2021, Skiff had a minimal online presence and was focused on delivering our first product - Skiff Pages.

Skiff Pages was built to be a modern, private collaboration product. As our lives become increasingly digital, privacy has become scarce, and every existing collaboration product lacked end-to-end encryption or collected a copious amount of data about users.

Skiff Pages was built to be different and better: End-to-end encrypted, completely private, and designed in the model of new and more flexible team collaboration products - with subpages, powerful tables, and shortcuts and markdown for power users.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people have used Skiff Pages to write notes, organize their team workspaces, and share public documents or wikis.

2022 was a big year for Skiff, as we launched 

 at the end of the year. We also launched 

 for each Skiff product, going from a web-only interface to the intuitive and ubiquitous native interfaces on iOS and Android. Today, Skiff Mail has over 

Towards the end of 2022, we launched Skiff Calendar, bringing private schedules, meetings, and video events to all Skiff users. Revamped Skiff 

 - Essential, Pro, and Business - have enabled businesses from 5 to 500 people to use Skiff effectively for their organization.

New Skiff Mail features were also launched, including custom domains, remote content blocking, and easy import from other mail providers.

2023 has already been a big year for Skiff. With Skiff 

 released, and new features for businesses and teams (catch-all aliases, domain purchasing, and more), we’ve seen accelerating adoption and enthusiasm for a privacy-first workspace.

Thank you so much to all of our users, supporters, and team members - we’ll continue sharing regular updates.

If you have any questions, feel free to join our 

, or contact us at support@skiff.org. You can also post a question on our 

Skiff turns 3

Email is the essential form of digital communication, bringing families, companies, and collaborators together across the world. As we communicate and collaborate with more people, managing contacts is a critical part of any personal or professional work.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the new Skiff Contacts features built into every Skiff Product. In addition to customizing contact preferences and settings, your contact list makes it easier to share, invite, or email any of your friends, colleagues, or family members.

Skiff Contacts is built into every Skiff product: Mail, Pages, Drive, and Calendar. From the contacts settings page, you can create new contacts or update any existing contacts, including name, email address, and custom profile pictures for every contact.

Any member of your organization will automatically be added to your contact list, keeping your colleagues immediately within reach.

Sending a calendar invite? Sharing a Skiff Page? Sending a critical end-to-end encrypted email?

Skiff Contacts are automatically synchronized across every Skiff product and application. Your contact list is a single source of all suggested recipients, making sure you always email, share, or invite the right people.

Whenever you email a new address, a contact is automatically created in your contacts settings. Initially, only an email address will be autopopulated, but you can easily customize additional fields, including first name, last name, preferred color, and a unique profile picture for your new contact. Contacts are also automatically created whenever you send a calendar invite to a new email address.

At any point, you can delete, remove, or modify contacts from the contacts 

, which is accessible from any Skiff product (Mail, Drive, Pages, and Calendar).

As Skiff Mail becomes even more powerful with more spam, filtering, and inbox organization features, contacts represent a reliable, trustworthy, and transparent way to keep your inbox private and safe. Contacts help filter out any unwanted email, spam, and senders who may try to phish or impersonate legitimate contacts.

For more information on how Skiff Mail protects your inbox, check out our blog on blocking 

Questions, comments, or feature requests?

If you have any questions or feature requests regarding how contacts work or integrate into Skiff products, you can reach out to us anytime on