Type of site Webmail Website tutanota.com Commercial Yes | Available in English Alexa rank 37,801 (March 2017) Registration Required | |
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Tutanota is an open-source end-to-end encrypted email software and freemium hosted secure email service. Tutanota is developed and provided by a German company, Tutao GmbH, since 2011. The name Tutanota is derived from the Latin words "tuta nota" which mean "secure message".
Contents
Encryption
Tutanota offers end-to-end encryption for emails sent from one Tutanota user to another. Tutanota also encrypts all emails and contacts. To external recipients, who do not use Tutanota, a notification is sent with a link to a temporary Tutanota account. After entering a previously exchanged password, the recipient can read the message and reply end-to-end encrypted.
History
Tutao GmbH is one of the few providers of encrypted emails. It was founded in 2011 in Hanover, Germany, which is the registered office as well. The founders say that they are developing Tutanota to fight for privacy online. When in 2013 Edward Snowden revealed NSA's mass surveillance programs like XKeyscore, their vision gained even more importance.
Tutanota currently employs five people. In 2014, the software was open-sourced and can be reviewed by externals. There have been 123 releases so far and 12 people contribute to the project. Both web and mobile app are open-source.
As of February 2016, Tutanota has over 1 million users.
From the start, Tutanota's business model excludes earning money through advertisement. The company's finances rely of donations and Premium subscriptions.
Account types
Tutanota offers free and paid accounts: Users of Premium accounts can use their own domains with Tutanota.
Functions
Tutanota is a Freemium email service. Some functions are available to all users of Tutanota while others can only be used by Premium accounts.
Free and Premium features:
Premium:
To login, the user needs one password. If the same is forgotten or lost, it can not be recovered and the account is useless. That is because the user is the only person who knows his password, it is not transferred to the server.
The hosted service does not offer IMAP/POP3/SMTP access, but has free apps for iOS and Android.
Tutanota supports all browsers, but some might not be officially supported which means that these browsers have not been tested for bugs.