Privacy @lemmy.ml countrypunk @slrpnk.net 11h ago

Is Tuta a good alternative to gmail?

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.

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~~Tuta and~~ Posteo are both pretty excellent (posteo is cheaper, but has a few less options that might be a deal breaker if you need them, like custom domain support).

Disroot is a good free option, and they offer custom domains after a one time donation.

Mailbox is okay, though they are known to have a very odd 2fa, and will recycle your address if you ever stop paying, allowing others to claim it and potentially impersonate you.

Posteo is unique in that they'll never delete your account for inactivity, or even if you stop paying, where they'll let you access and read emails, but not let you send them until you pay again.

Edit: apparently Tuta is going downhill according to others here, which is unfortunate :(
- Posteo's lack of custom domain support can be augemented by using Addy.io or other similar email proxy/forward services.
- Do they compare similarly in regards to privacy?
  
  From what I understand, Tuta may have a slight edge theoretically, but email itself is a pretty poor protocol when it comes to privacy.
  
  Tuta was forced by court order to implement a message logger for an individual, but AFAIK all of their previous messages were encrypted and could not be read by Tuta, and therefore the Government could only see new unencrypted messages coming in before they were encrypted.
  
  Disroot only recently implemented at-rest encryption, so that should be fairly solid now. Posteo also allows you to encrypt your inbox and calendar at rest.
  
  Even with that, consider all private email providers as mostly just to avoid surveillance capitalism (to prevent your data from being mined and sold), but with only marginal protection from state agents.
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.
- NOOOOOOO! Shit! Ah, for the love of cthulu ... damnit!
  
  Sigh ... this just bummed me out. Thanks for the info.
I've used Tuta for more than 4 years. It's a solid choice if you accept a couple few things:

they're a small company, doing their best to survive.

you have to use their client apps. They take security very seriously and assume all of their users do as well.

prices might go up every few years but I am still paying my original rate, for my original features.

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.
I've used Tuta for years, paid account with multiple custom domains.

I prefer them for their principles, but their clients are extremely frustrating. Emails load very slowly and their email search is basically unusable.

I've resorted to downloading old emails and using other clients to import and search through them. I really wish they would improve their email search.
- Appreciate the honest insight. Thanks for sharing. :)
- Thunderbird/Betterbird?
I’m currently planning on switching to Tuta as well. They have been the most recommended replacement since the proton incident.
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.
- This happens to me as well. It's a bit annoying but I still prefer it over others.
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 let's people try the service, and encourages them to become a paid user if they run up against the limits of the free tier.
Yes, I use it and generally like it. Their app is a little buggy, but they have email support and accept bug reports on GitHub. This is helpful for finding out what other users are seeing. It's a small dev team with frequent releases
- Do you know if there's a difference in the frequency of releases of the f-droid version and the play store version?
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?
  
  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.
  
  I don't think so. I'm in Sweden myself.
Tuta's product is snake oil.

A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against.

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.
Haven't read anything bad about Tuta so I guess it's fine. Other good ones are Proton, mailbox.org or posteo.de. Anything that's not by Google, Microsoft, and so on.
No PGP support kinda kills it imho
I have the feeling people actually need to have the urge from panic to have to migrate all their data.
no
- Care to elaborate?
  
  chodi joined lemmy 55 minutes ago. Ignore their non-reply and block
  
  yes

38 comments