Tutanota


Tutanota is an end-to-end encrypted email software and freemium hosted secure email service. Its business model excludes earning money through advertisement relying solely on donations and Premium subscriptions. The motto of the service "einfach.sicher.mailen" means "easy.secure.mailing".
As of March 2017, Tutanota's owners claimed to have over 2 million users of the product.

History

Tutanota is derived from Latin and contains the words ":wikt:tuta|tuta" and ":wikt:nota|nota" which means "secure message". Tutao GmbH was founded in 2011 in Hannover, Germany.
The goal of the developers for Tutanota is to fight for email privacy. Their vision gained even more importance, when Edward Snowden revealed NSA's mass surveillance programs like XKeyscore in July 2013.
In 2014, the software was open-sourced and can be reviewed by outsiders on GitHub.
In August 2018, Tutanota became the first email service provider to release their app on F-Droid, removing all dependence on proprietary code. This was part of a full remake of the app, which removed dependence on GCM for notifications by replacing it with SSE. The new app also enabled search, 2FA and got a new reworked user interface.

Encryption

Tutanota offers end-to-end encryption for emails sent from one Tutanota user to another. Tutanota also encrypts all emails and contacts. Tutanota uses a standardized, hybrid method consisting of a symmetrical and an asymmetrical algorithm - AES with a length of 128 bit and RSA with 2048 bit. 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.

Censorship

Tutanota has been blocked in Egypt since October 2019, and blocked in Russia since February 2020 for unknown reasons.