- (To my knowledge) Tuta doesn't have secondary services like VPN, etc.
- Tuta intentionally does not provide a bridge for email. So everything with their service has to be done through their apps. If you want to use your own email client or command line tools (such as for submitting patchsets to mailing lists), that's not an option.
"So everything with their service has to be done through their apps."
What sane person would do this? Use infomaniak instead (Switzerland). Tuta seems to be a German company. There is another one, I forgot the name but a few friends of mine were using it. I used google, could not find it but I am actually surprised that there are many providers. E.g.
I use Gmail, and have exclusively used the web app and Android app to access it, for, what, 15 years? I don't think it's insane, if those apps work well.
Your example is wrong. Gmail offers standard email services that you CAN access via a proprietary Google app OR to a regular app. I use my gmail account with IMAP via Thunderbird. As long as IMAP access is offered, everything is fine.
As a word of caution: Should you ever lose access to your gmail account, you run into deep trouble. I currently can't access my gmail. I know the password, I have access to my backup email but it won't let me log-in except if I am able to confirm it on my android phone. And my US android phone is out of service. I have to fly to the US to get this working again (Google project fi).
But even with gmail, they give you the option to use your own apps because they support standard protocols that you can use to sync your emails.
For E2EE email it's a bit different because most of the standard protocols don't work out of the box but it's very clear that whatever system Tuta uses works locally or they wouldn't have anything but a web app.
I'm not saying don't prioritise your apps, I just want to be able to mutt and send in patches easily. And my grandparents want to use their outlook because it's what they know how to use.
"But hey, "open source all things" have decided I must use 4 products from 4 different providers to send an receive emails so that I am "safe"."
Depends. For my mother? She is fine with gmail. But an IT savvy person should consider having their own email domain. And why not host your own rss reader and a few other things. It is rarely a good idea to buy this out of one hand. So domain registrar (e.g. internet.bs ), email hosting (e.g. infomaniak.com ) and hosting (e.g. nearlyfreespeech.net ). So we are close to your 4 different providers.
"Products should just work the way they are intended to be."
Until they don't. Until you get blocked (try calling google email customer service). Or until they go bankrupt. Your license? Sorry, the server for license validation does not exist anymore. Or until somebody decides what you can do with the product and what not. Doing your own thing and using open source gives your freedom.
if you don't pay for the product you are the product.
> But an IT savvy person should consider having their own email domain.
Having email domain is different than hosting your own email servers. And even that - why would I care so much? There are plenty of articles here on HN of people telling how hard it is to host your own email servers.
Plus, tech-savvy doesn't mean I want to waste 2 hours a week updating managing servers etc., while I could maybe learn ... "Flutter"? Or technology X. Or something else completely different.
In general, assuming what a group of people should or shouldn't do seems pretty naive to me.
> if you don't pay for the product you are the product.
I pay for Fastmail and it works. Until when? I can't tell - I hope they don't go bankrupt. But they offer a good service, decent price, and it gives me 1-2 hours of life back per week or month.
I understand your counterarguments, however nowadays there is enough variety that enables us to use products and services for quite some time. Even open source can get you into "vendor" lock-in, especially when a tool or product doesn't evolve anymore and the community doesn't have interest or manpower to improve it.
I said buy email as a hosted service. I consider myself IT savvy but I am not a CS guy. I tried hosting my own email before and I can assure you, if you are not absolutely sure you know what you are doing (inc. spam, greylisting, blacklisting etc.). DONT DO IT. I would possibly even be impossible to send email to services like t-online if you really host your own email.
Your citation is cut off and doesn’t show why Posteo says it won’t support this..I’m pasting the entire answer from Posteo on this topic [1] here:
> Can I use Posteo with my own domains?
> “No. We are an email provider with a particular, privacy-oriented model – and this is not compatible with incorporating own domains. One of our emphases is data economy: we do not collect any user information (names, addresses, etc) of our customers. We always answer requests from authorities for user information in the negative. On the other hand, own domains need to be registered to the name and address of a person. If you were able to use own domains with us, this would affect the entire concept of Posteo: we would need to start saving user information for all customers who use their own domains with us – and to provide these to the Federal Network Agency to be provided on request to the authorities.
Even if only the MX record pointed to us, we would still need to store the assignment of the domain in your Posteo account as user information. Thus we would possess your user information and be required to give it out. For this reason, we have decided not to offer this possibility and instead to use data economy.”
Whether this sounds fine or not and whether this is acceptable to someone or not is subjective.
The desktop client is basically a web app, little different from running it in the browser. As for the app, I have been pretty unimpressed by it; performance is sluggish, and emails are displayed poorly (lots of unreadably small fonts with no options for text resizing). Worst of all, development seems to be either inactive, or so slow as to be undetectable.
I paid for Tutanota and started switching to it from Gmail, but the accumulation of inconveniences is starting to make me consider switching back, in spite of all the Google privacy issues.
Can use Proton for accounts you will rarely check. Free accounts on Tutanota are deleted if haven't logged in 6 months. (And cannot remake one with same address unless you pay.)
Switzerland vs Germany, laws and governmental coercion history. There is also the individuals running them and their background and scale of operation, proton is much more used so it is a bigger target but it also makes more money so more resources for tech and legal stuff.
Why exactly do you believe Switzerland is better in terms of data protection than Germany? Do you not need to share data with the US as well upon request? The good thing - in both countries - is that it has legal oversight, besides the data on our servers is encrypted so we don't really see the location benefit here.
And what about data retention laws in Switzerland? In the past, you said Protonmail is exempt from this as its too small. Would be interesting to know if this is still the case?
Proton does proper email crypto that works with other providers (normal PGP) and tuta does their own thing (not saying Proto is good tho, it's still a horrible web UI and comes with its risks)
