Email Privacy Made Easier with Tutanota

Email Privacy Made Easier with Tutanota

Let us preface this by saying (again) there is no privacy on the internet. But there are ways to protect at least some of your privacy, like not using social media or privacy browsers, or email services. But remember some privacy comes at a cost and that cost is convenience.

Moving right along. We’ve already reviewed and recommended Swiss-based Proton Mail as one of the best anonymous email services. In our quest to help you find some modicum of privacy on the internet which has become a swill hole of data breaches, ransomware attacks, endless hacks, and let’s not forget spying by governments and government agencies, we’ve found another excellent anonymous email service you may want to check out. It’s called Tutanota. Not exactly sure how to pronounce that because it’s a German firm and my German starts and ends with sauerkraut. But I can tell you more about Tutanota…

Tutanota is a top choice for cybersecurity and privacy experts. Tutanota uses its own unique encryption standard to encrypt your entire inbox, including the subject lines of your emails and your contacts list.

Tutanota is a secure email service that provides end-to-end encryption for emails. It was founded in 2011 in Germany and has since gained popularity as a privacy-focused email provider.

“Tutanota lets you send encrypted emails to any email address in the world – automatically if the recipient uses Tutanota as well, or via a shared password if the recipient uses another service. Even emails sent or received unencrypted are stored encrypted on our own servers based in Germany…”

Tutanota’s encryption system ensures that only the intended recipient can read the email message. This is because the email is encrypted on the sender’s device before it is sent and can only be decrypted by the intended recipient on their device. Even Tutanota itself does not have access to the unencrypted content of the email message.

In addition to encryption, Tutanota also provides other security features such as two-factor authentication, spam filtering, and the option to use custom domain names. Tutanota also has mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices.

Tutanota offers a free plan with limited features, as well as paid plans with more storage and additional features.

When you sign up, you’ll see two messages in your inbox, this is a portion of one of them…

“Welcome to your secure, green, and ad-free Tutanota mailbox, protected with strong encryption.

Tutanota makes switching from other email services easy: Our intuitive apps for Android & iOS, as well as our desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, enable you to access your secure mailbox and calendar on any device – even when you are offline. If you still have an old email address, we recommend that you set up auto-forward in your old account and slowly transition all emails and contacts to Tutanota…

Check here to learn how you can forward your emails to Tutanota.

Once you have transferred all important conversations to Tutanota, you can deactivate auto-forward again. This way you will have a nice, clean, and spam-free mailbox!

Tutanota follows 4 principles to offer a privacy-friendly alternative to Big Tech.

Tutanota does not track you.
Tutanota can not scan your data.
Tutanota encrypts your entire mailbox, contacts & calendar.
Tutanota incorporates privacy by design…”

Signing up for a Tutanota email account

First, you must agree that you will only sign up for one free Tutanota account and that you won’t use it for business. If you want to use it for business email you’re required to sign up for a paid version. But we’re only recommending Tutanota for personal use since we’re not going to use it for business. The free plan gives you a generous 1 GB of storage for your emails, contacts, and attachments.

No personal information needed

You don’t need to enter any personally identifiable information to create your account. You are not asked for a contact phone number or an alternate email address. Instead, you’ll be given a recovery code you can copy and paste into a text file to save or print.

We recommend you save it as a text file since you can’t copy & paste very easily from a printed document. If you forget your email you can use the recovery code to access your account and your email. If you don’t have the recovery code, and you forget your password… say sayonara to your account.

Using Tutanota

Once you’ve signed up for an account, using Tutanota is much like other webmail apps. By default, your emails will be encrypted. You can tell by looking at the lock icon (see red arrow). Remember, if you encrypt your email, you’ll need to create a password. The password you create will be used by your recipient to decrypt the email. Without the password, your recipient cannot read your email.

If you don’t want your email to be encrypted, click the lock icon and it will show as unselected. When you deselect the lock icon you can send your email unencrypted and your recipient won’t need a password to read it.

Keep in mind, even if you choose to send emails unencrypted, they’re still far more private than mail sent from, let’s say, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, etc.  Being in Germany means Tutanota is protected by The German Federal Data Protection Act – a modification of the general EU GDPR law. It prohibits the collection and use of personal data unless the law specifically permits it or you have given your informed consent. Since Tutanota has a zero-knowledge architecture, even if you were a target of German authorities, the only information they’d have on you would be the time you went on/offline.  Tutanota has no access to the emails you store in your account.

And oh yes! We tested Tutanota. Its default settings allow you to send encrypted emails to anyone. But remember… if you’re going to send encrypted messages you must first create a password and share it with the recipient so they can decrypt and read your email – otherwise, no happiness will ensue. But remember it also means that your message can be read only by the recipient. No other prying eyes will be able to read it.

Interested in learning more about Tutanota? Head on over to the Tutanota website!