Tutanota email service review

after 2.5 years of daily usage (account type: Premium because of this)

tutanota logo, brand

About 2.5 years ago I had those (common?) questions:

• What email service should I use?
• What email service is the best?

and at that time I opted for Tutanota (name derived from Latin: concatenation of tuta and nota which means secure message) and stoped using gradually all my Gmail, Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail accounts mainly because of their lack of privacy.

PROS:

• simple and intuitive design, nice ui/ux both on desktop (used on Safari, Chrome, Firefox), BlackBerry 10 and iOS (iPhone 6S)
• spam filter seems to work extremely well: I get about 10x less spam compared to Yahoo!Mail
• my email was not sold to third parties because I got almost none unwanted emails compared to Yahoo!Mail in 2.5 years!
• there are no ads based on my emails contents anymore (can’t say the same thing compared to the period I was using Gmail)
• good/polite tech support
• encryption and decryption of data always happens locally on your device upon login. All data is end-to-end encrypted and only you can access the data with your password
• for encryption between Tutanota users they use a standardised, hybrid method consisting of a symmetrical and an asymmetrical algorithm (AES with a length of 128 bit and RSA with 2048 bit). Emails to external recipients are encrypted symmetrically with AES 128 bit
• Tutanota encrypts all your data (contacts, emails). Tutanota encrypts subject, content and attachments of emails
• Tutanota can read the following metadata: sender, recipient, date of the email. They are looking into possibilities to hide the metadata in the future as well
• the password is salted and hashed with Bcrypt on your device before being transmitted to Tutanota. Tutanota doesn't have any access to your password so they can't restore your password (try not to forget it)
• two-factor-authentication (2FA) is available only via the new Tutanota client
• easy custom domains integration with Tutanota email
• Tutanota is completely open source and the full source code is available on their public Github repository
• the servers are located in secure data centers in Germany. All saved data are subject to the strict German privacy protection laws. Independent of that all data is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by the Tutao GmbH as the provider or by any third party

BETWEEN PROS AND CONS:

• 5 aliases for Premium account type
• the size of emails with attachments sent via Tutanota is limited to 25 MB at the moment

CONS:

• on iOS, the number with unread emails on Tutanota icon is not refreshed when emails are read on other device (read on desktop from any browser)

Conclusion:

I strongly recommend Tutanota. You should review your current email service to see if it really worth to rely on it.

by Marian — Founder and CEO keybin App

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