The reason Notion acquires and kills this product is not because it is in any way an interesting product or company to them but because it has investors that need bailing out that are also Notion investors. Notion gets some nice people in their team and some of them might even stay.
This is a very common practice in silicon valley. VC funded companies fail all the time. Instead of letting them go bankrupt, investors and founders swap shares and walk away with an "exit" in their pocket. Everybody wins.
The only thing I can come up with is that the tech doesn't drop in as is because of the encryption so if they have to rebuild it under Notion’s brand do a clean cut and reboot targeting Notion’s market.
Running mail is hard.
Running mail is hard.
Candidly, the ability to profit off of email as a service is probably not a challenge that many businesses are up to. Deliverability is a massive pain in the ass. Unless you have the team and are well established, starting up or re-badging a mail service would be a nightmare.
Good email is expensive for a (bad) reason.
That said, Google and Microsoft essentially have monopolies in their respective areas of the market (Gmail in consumer, Outlook in B2B), and if you think they aren't slowly letting these products decline while cranking up the revenue extraction...you're dead wrong.
With LLMs they could eliminate spam in a much more reliable way without killing off small senders, tomorrow. Yet, they will never devote any real resources to these products, since they don't have to. Nobody wants to go through the hassle of changing their email.
Outlook still uses the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine, completely unchanged, from 20 years ago. That's all you need to know about the incentives for innovation after you've successfully captured a network.
Even with all that I still get dozens of scams and spam emails a day.
Tell me you don't understand inference costs without telling me.
C'mon. This is a forum called Hackernews.
On of the hardest parts is spam filtering both for incoming and outgoing traffic. In particular outgoing, so, e.g., a compromised or malicious user, can have harsh repercussions by big providers like M$ (Outlook) and Google. You can find a myriad of stories just on HN about these platforms literally not even allowing you to apply for access after an incident happened.
And your users won't care that M$, Google or Yahoo behaves like this, they will only care about their emails not being delivered by/ to you.
I had an internship at $company that offers manages hosting for Email along with web shops. The technical setup is the easier part of the business.
I'd bet they'll either unravel the E2EE from Skiff's software to relaunch it under their brad, or use their newly acquired expertise to build a Notion Email service from the ground up.