I’ve been looking to switch from gmail to a different email provider that’s more private. I’ve been hearing about Tuta, are there any drawbacks to it? Are there better options?
For a while I was planning on making the switch to protonmail but that’s off the table now due to the recent events surrounding them.
I’ve used Tuta for years, paid account with multiple custom domains.
I prefer them for their principles, but their clients are extremely frustrating. Emails load very slowly and their email search is basically unusable.
I’ve resorted to downloading old emails and using other clients to import and search through them. I really wish they would improve their email search.
Thunderbird/Betterbird?
I should re-iterate I download the emails to use in an offline client. Their service doesn’t support third party clients to receive and send email.
When I do taxes, I need to search thousands of emails for receipts and the tuta apps make this impossible. This is my workaround.
Right, so I’m wondering what client that is.
My bad. Its been a while, but Thunderbird at one point. If I remember right there was an update relatively recently that made it much more difficult to import offline emails, so if you find a better alternative let me know.
Hmm, I wonder if Betterbird has solved that problem… I’ve actually only ever used webmail as I didn’t understand the benefit of a desktop platform—until these (increasingly) privacy-invasive times!
It’s not Tuta but I adore Fastmail.
No BS. No gimmicks. Just privacy aware, protocol conformant E-mail at a reasonable price.
5€/month for email? 😵
Yeah. Email’s actually quite unpleasant (not hard) to do well. Look sideways at anyone doing it free or super-cheap.
Tuta’s product is snake oil.
If you don’t care about their (nonstandard, incompatible, and snake oil) end-to-end encryption feature and just want a freemium email provider which (purports to) protect your privacy in other ways, the fact that their flagship feature is snake oil should still be a red flag.
Is there anything about Startmail (company that does Startpage.com) that is worth avoiding? I’ve never paid for mail but if it’s solid and avoids Google I might.
StartPage/StartMail is owned by an adtech company who’s website boasts that they “develop & grow our suite of privacy-focused products, and deliver high-intent customers to our advertising partners” 🤔
They have a whitepaper which actually does a good job explaining how end-to-end encryption in a web browser (as Tuta, Protonmail, and others do) can be circumvented by a malicious server:
The malleability of the JavaScript runtime environment means that auditing the future security of a piece of JavaScript code is impossible: The server providing the JavaScript could easily place a backdoor in the code, or the code could be modified at runtime through another script. This requires users to place the same measure of trust in the server providing the JavaScript as they would need to do with server-side handling of cryptography.
However (i am not making this up!) they hilariously use this analysis to justify having implemented server-side OpenPGP instead 🤡
Wow, that is very disappointing. I had started using startpage as a Google alternative. While it still may be preferable to Google specifically, their mail product is definitely out.
Tuta andPosteo are both pretty excellent (posteo is cheaper, but has a few less options that might be a deal breaker if you need them, like custom domain support).Disroot is a good free option, and they offer custom domains after a one time donation.
Mailbox is okay, though they are known to have a very odd 2fa, and will recycle your address if you ever stop paying, allowing others to claim it and potentially impersonate you.
Posteo is unique in that they’ll never delete your account for inactivity, or even if you stop paying, where they’ll let you access and read emails, but not let you send them until you pay again.
Edit: apparently Tuta is going downhill according to others here, which is unfortunate :(
thanks for mentioning disroot, that seems much more like what i was looking for than tuta which i was originally going to try out.
Do they compare similarly in regards to privacy?
From what I understand, Tuta may have a slight edge theoretically, but email itself is a pretty poor protocol when it comes to privacy.
Tuta was forced by court order to implement a message logger for an individual, but AFAIK all of their previous messages were encrypted and could not be read by Tuta, and therefore the Government could only see new unencrypted messages coming in before they were encrypted.
Disroot only recently implemented at-rest encryption, so that should be fairly solid now. Posteo also allows you to encrypt your inbox and calendar at rest.
Even with that, consider all private email providers as mostly just to avoid surveillance capitalism (to prevent your data from being mined and sold), but with only marginal protection from state agents.
Tuta was involved in a Canadian spy case, where in court it was alleged to be a front for an EU Intelligence Agency. Cameron Ortis was the counterintelligence spy on trial. https://gizmodo.com/tuta-email-denies-connection-to-intelligence-services-1851022465 and lots more if one does a search. I know I wouldn’t use them, so you’ve been warned.
Ortis has claimed that some unnamed Five Eyes foreign agent introduced him to the honeypot operation and that he didn’t notify his superiors at the RCMP about it.
How can you trust an unnamed intelligence officer though? For all we know, they might have an actual honeypot competing against Tuta and want to gain marketshare.
After all, intelligence agencies are guaranteed to be the first one’s who discovered Ortis was selling secret information. Might as well give him fake information to spread around and make criminals doubt any previous information sold by him.
In comparison to Gmail? Yes, but that’s a very low bar to clear. You need to be aware that Tuta are currently enshittifying. The product is getting worse and the price increases. It’s slow, but it’s happening. I switched to disroot.org after 2 years of Tuta because I got fed up with it.
It is in my Scrolls of Grudge, and I quote:
Ads in web UI for paying user.
Made it hard to cancel payment.
Newsletter is just upselling.
Can’t unsub from newsletter.I am a paid user of Tuta and I have never seen any ads. Where did you see them and what kind of ads?
_drkt provided no proof of Tuta’s enshittification. There are no paid ads for third party products in any Tuta UI. Don’t panic yet. Read all the comments here, maybe.
no paid ads for third party products
Haha you almost fucking got me, I actually wrote a whole thing about how those are ads but then I read your comment again and noticed that clever little write-off. Ads for their own products are still ads and I don’t want to fucking see it. Get that shit off my eyeballs, I paid for this product.
The newsletter is an ad, it’s not news. They’re just advertising their products to you and you can’t unsubscribe and you can’t ignore it because they very deliberately have a special styling for the newsletters that makes it stand out from normal emails.
I don’t know why you want to defend this company. I’m glad you’re okay with the level of shitty behavior they engage in; it’s definitely less than most email providers do- I’m just letting people know that Tuta aren’t angels. They’re a company, and they used to be better. Proton was exactly the same. It was a good service and then it became shitty.
I would love to log back in and show you the 3 separate buttons on my UI that did nothing except link to a “Please pay us for this feature” page because I was a legacy premium user because I didn’t want all those new bullshit they made. I stress that it’s not a case of them implementing a button in the UI for all users and because I’m a legacy user I get it too even if I can’t use it- the buttons had special CSS to make them stand out. They were ads. Why couldn’t Tuta just leave me alone? I could still be paying them to this day if they had just not gone down that path. I just want an email that is an email and nothing more and doesn’t get in my way. Tuta had that, and then they took it away and asked for more money to put it back.
I think the misunderstanding here is that I was a legacy premium user. I was paying less to get only the email+calendar because that’s what I signed up for, originally. When people sign up today, that’s not an option. People who are new to Tuta (relatively) haven’t seen this change happen and haven’t witnessed how obviously desperate Tuta was to get people off the legacy premium plan.
Also my name is drkt_ but I’m sure you tried your best.
Get that shit off my eyeballs, I paid for this product.
You should try Proton, then /s
Proton constantly tries to push you to upgrade to their next plaid plan too. So much so that this coupled with still zero fucking support for Proton Drive under Linux are the two reasons I have cancelled my paid Proton plan… and I had been paying for years.
edit: typos
Yeah, I know! Don’t say that too loud, though. Proton and Tuta are the precious baby boys who can do no wrong in most “privacy” communities.
