Is it good? Are there any better alternatives?
I just swapped from proton to mailbox.org and I considered tuta heavily.
I chose mailbox over tuta because:
- tuta didn’t allow third party clients like thunderbird. Given I jumped to proton from Gmail and now mailbox from proton, I wanted to decouple as many systems as possible if I had to jump again.
- mailbox, if I’m remembering correctly, had better encryption properties except for their calendar. Tuta has an encrypted calendar, and now I’m looking into a self-hosted calendar system.
I think I would still recommend tuta to like my mother or something because it’s very clean and easy to set up and good enough. I’d recommend mailbox.org as a slightly harder alternative if you care about your calendar being encrypted.
I have used it a couple years now and I don’t have anything to complain. It has worked perfectly fine all the time.
My opinion on tuta: Can I use thunderbird? No? Goodbye.
There are many alternatives, but given that I haven’t switched from a trash free one as I don’t want to spend money for just having a mail server, it would be hypocritical to recommend any.
paid for a year a while back when they had some discount. will not renew.
like others have said:
- no standard protocols support to use other clients and their clients are shit
- no client improvement in the last year
- their pricing buckets are weird and the price per gigabyte is too high
it’s a niche product. if e2ee is the primary goal, that’s fine. it’s not what most people want/need. as far as I see it, we lack a good service with no tracking/mining and tuta is just too much limiting.
I prefer it over gmail and outlook, but as others have said, it leaves a bit to be desired
Payed for 5 years, but now I’m in the progress of migrating to a “regular” mailservice. Problems I have with tuta: The client has become super slow in recent months, it seems to get worse and worse. Notifications don’t arrive or arrive too late (Android). No other way than to use it with their clients. No offline support (or at least it doesn’t work for me). UI/UX isn’t that great either.
Would you recommend it as a secondary service?
Depends on your needs. It’s reasonable for mails you don’t need instantly or offline, but at the same time should be encrypted at rest. I don’t know if there is a new pricing model now, but I have paid 1€ a month, so basically nothing. If you don’t mind the downsides and encryption is important to you, it’s a very fair price I think.
I just migrated away from Tuta after trying the service for a year. I like it well enough, but it presented too many frustrations to be a service to pay for.
- While they have labels (yay!) their inbox rules cannot apply labels so you are stuck manually tagging everything (boo!) - and the UI for manually tagging could use improvement.
- Mobile (Android) notifications stop working frequently.
- While they integrate their contacts in to the Android contact list, they refuse to integrate their calendar with the Android system calendar - meaning I cannot pull a consolidated list of calendar events in to my launcher, and am stuck using their calendar application (which could use a lot of improvement).
- If you set a calendar event reminder, and then change the time of the event, the reminder will go off at the original event time (or 15/30 minutes before, whatever you set it to).
- Long refreshes when loading the inbox. Navigating back to the application often has the server disconnected, then you have to wait a spell for it to reconnect so you can carry on.
After searching around and checking purelymail, infomaniak, mailbox.org, mxroute, migadu, zoho, etc. I landed on fastmail (with my own domain) predominantly because of their implementation of labels (super slick). Their mobile app and desktop applications are also very slick. Contacts/calendar sync in to the Android System is done through DavX, but I also have it syncing to my Nextcloud instance. It’s a more expensive solution than the others, but labels (tags/categories) are such an important part of my workflow that there aren’t a lot of options unless I wanted to go back to M365/Google Workspace.
If I was to give up labels, I’d probably go with infomaniak or mailbox.org. Both of their offerings were slick and the price was right.
Thank you for your info
Doesn’t allow third party email clients.
I can recommend Posteo.
AFAIK 3rd party clients not supported cause of lack e2e encryption support
There is a small important distinction.
It is because there is no proprietary e2e encryption by default exclusively while communicating with others on tuta.
E2e encryption for 99.99999% of emails is via passworded pgp that everyone else has and uses or not encrypted at all. I have tuta for years and have yet to send or recieve a single encrypted mail that is the reason that they can’t have a 3rd party app outside of tuta’s own advertisements I get served.
It is vendor lock in. Pure, plain, and simple.
Wouldn’t be as much of a problem if their client wasn’t so bad. No auto moving messages as far as I can tell, absolutely horrid search functionality where I can type the sender email word for word and it will find 0 results, and just having almost no productivity or inbox managing features in general
I still think it would be better to give the user freedom, and just give a warning that there are privacy risks.
I don’t mind non 3rd party, I want it for secondary email for now.
Posteo is paid only unfortunately:(
Fortunate for me, Posteo is a pair service so that their employees can live a good life by working. I get their service. I pay. I don’t like someone else paying for me then show me ads or sell my data.
I’ve been on Posteo for years now, they’ve been rock solid. As for Tuta.io, the issue specifically is no IMAP support, which is what third party email clients need to function.
I thought I’d also mention Protonmail, which might look good, but is in a similar boat. They technically do provide IMAP support, but not in a way that matters. If you wanted to connect Protonmail to Thunderbird or, if you’re an insane person, Microsoft Outlook, you’d need another app running on your PC along with your email app called Proton Bridge, which just sounds like a hassle. No mobile version either.
I’d say stick with Posteo. Alternatively, if you want to use your own domain name, I’ve heard good things about mailbox.org.
Just to clarify - Protonmail does have a mobile app (works great by the way, especially on Graphene)
My bad, I wasn’t clear enough. I actually meant Proton Bridge has no mobile version, meaning you can only use the official app you mentioned, but not any third party apps like K-9 Mail/Thunderbird or FairEmail.
Aw yeah that makes sense actually on rereading it. I think i was going to try the Proton Bridge at first on moving to Linux but then saw it was only available via their paid version.
That put me off lol, so I’m just sticking to using it via browser and their own mobile app for now.
I deleted my Protonmail after learning about their metadata filtering practices. The more you learn about Proton the sketchier they seem.
Source, pretty please? I’d like to read up.
Their privacy policy expressly states they have access to metadata and they have a non-public blacklist which filters “undesirable” domains. Try creating an account on zlibrary using your Protonmail.
Also worthy of notice, they are legally forced to hand over shitloads of user data as seen in their transparency report.
Not to be a tinfoil hat guy, there’s good reason for this and there’s no free email service that is much better privacy-wise. The actual content of your mails are probably safe with Proton.
Their privacy policy states the obvious, and repeats what’s in the SMTP RFC (821). I can only guess this is because of transparency. All email providers have access to that information. I would actually argue for them that they are better at letting people know which kind of data they do and don’t have access to.
Every (email) service is bound to the law of the country they reside or operate in. Proton has part of its offerings in Switzerland, part in EU (Germany if I recall well). Swiss FADP is very close to GDPR. Also when it comes to privacy protection. Every company bound to GDPR (or FADP) has to abide to the law, and when law enforcement has a good reason to check out user data, and the judge agrees, any company has to provide evidence. Even non-EU based companies offering services in EU. With their transparency report they are providing a tool to their users to know and understand what happens to their data in a lawful manner. And I see that as a win for transparency.
But this is just my opinion, and it is ok to not agree with how I see the world.
I don’t disagree and like I said, you won’t find much better free privacy-oriented email services. Their filter is rather heavy-handed when it comes to “undesirable” domains and as a pirate I’ve run into it enough to seek other services.
Your view of the world is quite reasonable, I think!
LOL. Thats kinda absurd. So many people seem to recommend it but…
Most people don’t need 3rd party clients and just use the web interface or wtv is the native app for the product they are using. Using thunderbird or K9 clients for example is a fringe use case for most people anyway.
I’m not sure I would call using a third-party email client a ‘fringe’ use case. As of yesterday, Thunderbird has 10,992,366 active daily installations. Sure, it’s probably not as many as mobile clients, but that’s still a helluva lot of people using it.
Yeah, only nutty fringe dwellers would want to use an email client to manage their email. /s
i’ve been a tuta (paid) user for 3 years and im thinking of self-hosting or switching providers bc i now want to use a third party client
i want to check out mailo because they support custom domains and have catchall functionality and are in the EU (like tuta) but allow third party clients
They have a reputation for deleting free accounts. If you plan to use Tuta for more than a few months be sure to use their paid plans, not free.
Killed my account bc they didn’t feel I used it enough. F’em…
Probably because its free account
Do they really do that? I also use my account very little, should I be worried? It’s 5-6 months old
If you sign in every few months you should be fine.
Works fine. Android app doesn’t require Google push notifications, unlike Proton. I like that they aren’t chasing the AI pipe dream.
I’m not a fan of how they use their blog to shit on other privacy projects.
A few weeks ago, they recommended CalyxOS. I informed them that Calyx is a dead project. The next week Calyx is getting recommended again. The person(s) writing their blog doesn’t seem to have a clue even when giving the information on a platter.
I like it
It’s great. It stores and sends email. What could be better?
An email provider who doesn’t lock you into their ecosystem and doesn’t collaborate with law enforcement without putting up a fight.
Source on the law enforcement claim?
Tuta’s trancparency report vs Posteos
Does Tuta do that? I’ve missed that discussion in that case, I’ve been using them myself and if I can expect to be locked if I want to try another provider I’d rather switch now than when it becomes an even larger hassle
