Privacy Review: TutaNota | Victor Fitzjarrald

What is Tutanota?

Tutanota is one of the “up-and-coming” encrypted email providers. What I like about Tutanota is the ability to send emails to anyone – regardless of if they have the encryption keys or not. As the video shows, you can send messages to anyone with a predefined password. You will of course need to communicate with those folks to give them the “secure” password. Tutanota is free right now and has a wonderful app (and is one of the few encrypted services that does). There is a soft spot in my heart for TutaNota – simply because it was one of the first Zero-Knowledge providers that I began to work with. For a free service, they cannot be beat – organization of emails is easy, creating emails is simple, and the app is streamlined. They are missing two very important things: Drafts and PGP Support.

I use drafts all the time. To store data and text from other sources before it is ready to send. The lack of a drafts bin makes it hard for me to use the service, as I need to have everything ready and formed before I actually compose the message. The lack of PGP usage makes the app unusable by people who actually use a PGP key – the tried and true encryption methodology. Several of the other services do a great job of integrating PGP keys and support, hopefully Tutanota will support PGP in coming updates.

I will keep my Tutanota account going for some time, and will keep you all apprized of anything major that happens. Follow my blog and my twitter page for updates.

The Video Review

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Overall Rating

Interface
Engagement
Privacy Value
Productivity Value
Zero Knowledge / Open Source

4.4

Summary

Overall, I find that Tutanota is a great “free” email client. If you want to switch to an encrypted email, you could do much worse. The company is great – very responsive to app feedback and reviews – and very open about the encryption and methods that they use. Tutanota is a German company, which gives you a bit more privacy that hosting in the US. The interface is a bit simple and lacking some productivity tools that I would like to see (drafts, tags, etc.). The lack of OpenPGP support also limits the use of Tutanota in the broader encrypted email scene.