🔥 A Rant About Tutanota 🔥

2024-01-26

This is a small review of tutanota and why I am giving up this service after years of use.

Note: Tutanota rebranded to Tuta.

Why Tutanota?

Tutanota has many things going for itself:

  • Signup without having to disclose anything.
  • Nice UI.
  • Free plan with not too many cutbacks.
  • A feeling of trust.

Not having to give them my phone number or payment information made a real difference when signing up and trying the service. I had no regrets switching in the first years of use as most of the basic functionality is there with the free plan. The lack of ads was refreshing and I felt for the first in a long time that I was not the product. Tutanota in this sence has every justification of existing.

First Gripes

  • Tutanota has zero IMAP support.1 This might not seem to be a problem for many people until you consider how to move your emails. How do I backup emails!? How do I use GPG? Ok the last part probably does not interest most users, until they consider that other similar services use GPG as open standard for e2ee automatically and thus all the comunication of a Tutanota user with other people is definitely not e2ee! Moreover the missing IMAP support means, that you cannot use advanced interfaces like Thunderbird or the like. “This is terrible” I noticed after using Thunderbird for my email tasks for university for a year. Thunderbird IS the better email program:

    • It IS crossplatform, while Tutanota only has their almost untested linux package2. And I say that as I’ve used their linux desktop program and it is terrible, buggy and makes no use of package managers!
    • Moreover Thunderbird automatically updates, while Tutanota does NOT! Not under Windows! Not under Linux!
    • Thunderbird has very good search functionality! Tutanota (free plan) has almost no search functionality! Even if I downloaded all my emails I could not search in the program3! This is unfathomable… “Why do I need your servers for searching my local emails!?” I cannot comprehend why you’d design such system…
    • Thunderbird supports automatic rules (even if poorly designed). Tutanota (free plan) does not.

    This just means that with any other privacy friendly email service, which supports IMAP, you’ll have a better time, a much better time!
    Imagine being on time for covid vaccination and then having to tell the soldier that you cannot check your emails as you have no reception and your email provider does not support offline view4!
    If Tutanota had IMAP you’d not have to user their app! And they want you to use their app! Else thered be too few incentives for people to use their very badly priced premium plans.

  • Bad Prices: This always gets me. Back then Tutanota was realtively reasonably priced. 1€/month for basically fixing the problems above with unlocking their app. Just that this was still not a good price. Their main competitor is and was Mailbox and they offered for the same price 2GB email storage, IMAP and autocrypt support. They still offer that plan for 1€ a month5. Tutanota does not anymore. Now you’ll have to pay 3€/month. Yeah you get more with 3€ but that is not the point. If I had IMAP support, I’d have at least the choice to batch archive emails and remove the old ones.
    Tutanota offers 20 GB for 3€. When it runs full you have no choice but to upgrade, as Tutanota does NOT offer you to export all your emails6! On another note: I can get ~ 1TB for 4€ with s3 compatible cloud storages. This also gets me every time. Dear reader are you seeing where this is going?

Other Gripes

  • Encrypted Mailboxes are a Joke! It does not matter if the mailbox is encrypted or not. The communication up till the point is not e2ee (Tutanota does not give you the ability to do so). That essentially means that your emails can be read by: The person you want to communicate with, their email provider and Tutanota!

  • Multiple Mailboxes. Domains are cheap. It should not matter how many mailboxes I have as long as their entire use is below the allowed maximum of py price plan, right? Wrong says Tutanota!

  • Needless Post-Quantum Security. Tutanota heavily invested into quantom security. But between you and me: Why not wait until an industry wide standard is adopted? Hmmm? How many years until asymetric encryption is broken? Hmmm? Why not fix the other problems first?

Why am I Switching?

  1. I need a mailbox with working filters!
  2. I need more storage!
  3. I need multiple mailboxes!
  4. I wish to use a vendor agnostic mail client!
  5. Tutanotas subscription is too expensive for the value!

Alternatives

Using Another Mail Service

Here are some of my considerations (The numbers are what is fixed from above):

  • Mailbox (1. 2. 4.) Straight Tutanota alternative. If you have considered Tutanota you probably have considered Mailbox.
  • Yahoo Mail (1. 2. 4. 5.) Yes even Yahoo does the list. The pro really is number 2. and 5. You’ll get 1TB of storage and actually some features like temporary email adresses also don’t sound too bad. The con compared to Mailbox might be the trust factor. But lets be frank you should only trust into e2ee!
  • MXroute (1. ~2. 3. 4. 5.) This seems to solve most my gripes with Tutanota. Though being frank I have never heard of this company before. Nonetheless this might just be an option.

Self Hosting the Mailserver (with Mailcow)

This actually covers all my needs (1. – 5.). Though there are some things to consider.

Where do I host?

I’ve actually tried this first time around by hosting the mailserver at home. The problem with this approach is, that with a dynamic IP address you probably are allready on a black list and even if not, you can never build up reputation as email server.
The solution: Host the mailserver on a VPS.

  • Contabo:
    • Very good prices.
    • Good Trustpilot score7.
    • Though there have been some problems in the past year especially with availability.

There are of course other services, but none can contend with Contabo regarding price.

Conclusion

I’d not use Tutanota again and I do not recommend people to use them until at least IMAP support is sorted out.
As to what I’ll use in the future, I am not entirely sure yet. (Mailcow + VPS) vs MXroute.

Edit: I’ve decided to go with “MXroute”.