Tutanota is an open source email provider. It features easy to use end to end encryption. It’s notable as a modern, libre, and cheap hosted email provider.

Why not gmail

Gmail is easily the best email provider. It’s light years ahead of any open source system. It’s gratis for individual, education, nonprofit, and small business use. That makes it hard to compete with. However it’s also a giant proprietary service directing a huge portion of your communication to the world. As a free software advocate it’s hard to feel good about using Google services – especially ones as critical as communication. Google also took concerning steps to remove interoperability in it’s chat service by removing XMPP in the Google Hangouts.

In looking at alternatives I want something hosted (I do not want to deal with tech problems at home for something as important as email). I’d like something cheap – because even cheap is more expensive that Gmail. I also want something modern looking and easy to use.

The Good

Tutanota’s big feature is security. It’s not hosted in the United States. You can encrypt emails by clicking a button. It doesn’t sell your information to ad networks. It doesn’t leak your personal information when such ad networks or government agencies get hacked.

Tutanota has a modern web interface with native mobile apps (web wrapper, but acceptable). It’s minimalist but that isn’t necessarily bad.

Tutanota is easy to use. You can use their hosted version if you trust them and don’t want to host yourself. Setting up a custom domain was pretty easy. Aliases are no problem. It supports multiple users too (but I haven’t tested this out yet).

It’s cheap at 1€ per month per user for the premium account. It also has a free tier if you can go without a custom domain.

The Bad

Tutanota doesn’t support IMAP. That’s pretty annoying. I’d be highly annoyed if there was any decent open source email client – but as there is not I can forgive it. IMAP wouldn’t work with their security model. I wish they had it as an option with a big warning about security.

It lacks a lot of features you expect in email. As I said Gmail is way ahead here. No magic category filtering. No filtering rules. No contact book integration. Not even keyboard shortcuts.

Tutanota only recently open sourced it’s code. It needs to do more to promote a developer community. A public issue tracker would be nice. So would a contribution guide. Right now they only offer a user voice page that is more consumer focused. I left my feedback.

Conclusion

Tutanota is a great option if you want an open source email provider – but only if your feature requirements are minimal. It has great potential as they add more features. The world needs an easy way to send private messages and right now such privacy is a luxury for those very few who understand PGP encryption and can set up services themselves. I applaud anyone trying to make this easier.