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 been using it for a few months now. Works just fine, doesn’t do anything fancy but it doesn’t need to. Filter rule creation is pretty limited, and the desktop client doesn’t play well with my VPN for some reason, but otherwise it works fine.
I recommend mailbox.org instead.
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.
Those two services have strengths but they also have some drawbacks, that are more or less painful depending one’s needs. If there are people out there who feel so empty that they can’t stand any critics concerning a product they think is great, well, what can I say? I’m so sorry for them.
NOOOOOOO! Shit! Ah, for the love of cthulu … damnit!
Sigh … this just bummed me out. Thanks for the info.
What did proton do wrong? Legit question, I’m out of the loop.
Nothing. It’s just FUD.
Here’s an article about it: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
Even if the CEO did support the orange turd, I would personally still be able to separate his personal opinion from what the non profit is doing.
That was informative, thanks.
I agree with you, I would be extremely surprised if the Proton CEO supported Trump… I would say very unlikely.
Very thinly veiled tho… It’s not an immediate threat, but it’s best to just move away from it if you can.
Great source, thanks :)
He explicitly supported the republican party in its current guise. That’s enough for me to run. Fastmail is where I’ve temporarily landed - would prefer somewhere away from Aussie jurisdiction, but it felt like the least-shit.
Yes.
I’ve had a bug with the android app where sometimes notifications for emails just don’t happen. I’ve received a new email notification, opened the app, and found that the notification was for an email received 5 hours ago, and I didn’t get any notification for the email 3 days ago or the email 1 hour ago.
Despite this issue and several other minor issues, I still recommend Tuta. Mostly because I can’t find anything better.
If you’re on Android, by any chance, have you gone through all the battery optimization, background process killing, and startup settings? Some OEM’s versions of Android are real bad in that way. Giving the app the right settings and permissions may decrease the number of delayed notifications like that.
I am using Android until I can find an alternative. I’ve turned off all optimisations I can find. I haven’t had the issue in a few weeks, but it did happen once since changing settings. I’m hoping that something random I did (like a phone restart) somehow fixed everything.
I am using Android until I can find an alternative
You mean you’re considering something like PostmarketOS? Just wonder where people are looking for alternatives.
I’m looking everywhere I can. I haven’t found any OS that works with my current phone (Nokia G42), and the aren’t too many phones that meet my needs (dual Sim, small, headphone jack, repairable, runs open source OS).
I’ve given up actively searching and I’m mostly browsing Lemmy and hoping to stumble across something useful. Please let me know if you have any more suggestions.
This happens to me as well. It’s a bit annoying but I still prefer it over others.
No PGP support kinda kills it imho
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.
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? 😵
Services cost money to run. Either you pay for the product or you are the product.
Make your choice, name your poison. No skin off my nose in any case :)
I mean I self host for 4€/month and I could fit multiple emails in there
Email is pretty much just about storage at some point, and there are a lot more cost effective servers for this, than a simple VPS
Self hosting email is a non trivial effort. I’ve done it before and am in zero rush to do it again.
And before you tell me “Oh hey I’ve had no problems at all with delivery getting blocked by GOOG or MSFT” good on you but that has NOT been a lot of people’s experience trying to self host their E-mail, including mine.
Yeah. Email’s actually quite unpleasant (not hard) to do well. Look sideways at anyone doing it free or super-cheap.
I’m selfhosting with mailcow and it’s great
I am very happy with Proton.
I’ve tried tuta before. It seems pretty okay, but it doesn’t support IMAP meaning you have to use their app, and (at least for me) it was SLOW.
I personally use disroot, but there’s loads of other options, like mailfence seems like a decent alternative. Just pick one that supports IMAP
I’m using Tuta and their app for a few years now. The app was slow indeed but it’s good now, no problems so far. Lack of IMAP support is justified with security, they say. I personaly don’t need IMAP as I’m completely satisfied with the app, which is available officially in f-droid btw.
yk, fair enough. if you like it, that’s fine by me
I don’t have the know how to talk about safety and privacy, but here are some caveats.
I think you have to use their client and can’t add your adress to 3rd party clients like thunderbird. Their client is however nice to work with.
If you forgot your password, the only way to change it is by using a key that is given to you after account creation. Keep it safe! Check for spelling errors If you lost the note or it’s not in you passwordmanager or whatever you use, your account is not recoverable. Their support can’t help you reset your pw.
Other than that they make email encryption pretty easy with a checkbox right under the recipient in the email editor.
Another handy feature are the aliases. (Payed feature) You can set up some email adresses for certain purposes, and filter their traffic into different inboxes quite easily. If one of them.get’s compromised, deactivate and move in. Your master adress is probably still usable.
What I do not like is the fact that paying customers get support first.
I don’t get why they don’t just make it a paid service entirely. Seems odd that email providers like to do that.
Offering a free tier lets people try the service, and encourages them to become a paid user if they run up against the limits of the free tier.
I don’t know if tuta and posteo have some special privacy features, but if you’re just looking for a non-gmail provider I’ve been very happy with fastmail. It’s an Australian provider with a good track record afaik.
Would also highly recommend getting your own domain if you can, so your address doesn’t belong to whichever provider you choose.
I’m in the US. I wonder if there’s any drawback to using an Australian provider. Like, will it get flagged or something?
I don’t think so. I’m in Sweden myself.
If it’s Australian, don’t expect strong privacy. But then again, I wouldn’t expect that from a US based email provider either.
Source: am Australian.
If you don’t want to run your own mail server then there will always be a trade off somewhere. That trade off could be high costs to pay a tech firm to run a private mail server for you, could be lack of features, could be privacy, could be a lot of things. Even with your own mail server there will be trade offs around security etc. depending upon your skillset.
Personally, I have a hybrid approach.
- Business is on a mail server
- Personal with sensitive data (health, bills, etc.) is on a mail server
- Personal - subscriptions, newsletters, etc. is on Proton
- Everything else is on Gmail
I also have other accounts (e.g. DDG, Apple Mail, for specific use cases, but I forward the content I receive there into Gmail.
I’ve had a look at Tuta and haven’t seen enough to convince me to move anything there. I’m not going to move my mail servers to a cloud provider, Gmail is there because the address is 20 years’ old and I can’t be bothered updating everywhere that it’s used, and Proton has been great for years, has grown well, and has a corporate mission that I agree with. DDG, Apple Mail etc. is what the internet sees of me - They generate unique email addresses and then I forward the content I want into Gmail, or sometimes Proton.
I’ve used Tuta for more than 4 years. It’s a solid choice if you accept a couple few things:
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they’re a small company, doing their best to survive.
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you have to use their client apps. They take security very seriously and assume all of their users do as well.
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prices might go up every few years but I am still paying my original rate, for my original features.
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the search function does work but is very slow.
But otherwise, I’m very happy and expect to stay with them for the forseeable. Good luck in your search.
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