[HN Gopher] Tutanota is now free for open source projects
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       Tutanota is now free for open source projects
        
       Author : NmAmDa
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2021-11-22 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tutanota.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tutanota.com)
        
       | ptidhomme wrote:
       | The most important feature Tutanota lacks is offline usage, IMHO.
       | You can't access your email if you have a poor or nonexistent
       | connection.
        
       | invalidname wrote:
       | Secure email service. Would be nice to actually mention that in
       | the title...
        
         | httpsterio wrote:
         | Hacker news has a rule about not editorializing headlines, they
         | have to be posted as they are on the linked site.
         | 
         | A lot of the users this affects are most likely also familiar
         | with tutanota's services I'd guess.
        
       | thepill wrote:
       | Still waiting to be able to import existing mails (would like to
       | switch from protonmail)....
        
       | LVDOVICVS wrote:
       | After I gave up running my own mail server I started used
       | Tutanota for my small personal domain. They're cheap and reliable
       | in my experience.
        
       | culi wrote:
       | What made me end up choosing Tutanota over Protonmail was that
       | the free tier gave 1GB of storage (compared to Protonmail's
       | 500MB). I've been using it for my primary email for over a year
       | now and haven't had any major issues with it. The desktop and
       | mobile apps feel pretty solid to me though I'm not a particularly
       | heavy email user.
        
       | throwaway81523 wrote:
       | I don't understand this thing about encrypting stored email if
       | the other person receives it or saves a copy in the clear. Most
       | of the time, the other person is on gmail, so there is a
       | plaintext copy of your email on a google server, and everything
       | that implies.
       | 
       | The two big hassles of self-hosting email are incoming spam on
       | the receiving side, and deliverability issues on the sending due
       | to very aggressive antispam measures at the big email providers.
       | Hosted email services' product is basically continuous
       | maintenance of spam filtering on the receiving side, and e.g.
       | building IP reputation and retrying failed deliveries through a
       | clean IP pool on the sending side. Merely running an IMAP or SMTP
       | server without these efforts is comparatively easy.
       | 
       | So it seems to me sufficient to use a privacy-conscious hosted
       | provider for filtering and SMTP but not for storage, and handle
       | storage yourself. I'm currently not doing that due to laziness
       | but it seems like a proper and feasible thing to do. There isn't
       | much point going overboard when the traffic is general purpose
       | email, where the weakest link will usually be at the other
       | person's end (and out of your control) rather than at your end.
        
         | upofadown wrote:
         | For incoming unencrypted email you can encrypt it to an OpenPGP
         | identity for storage. Some providers offer this as an option.
         | Anonaddy can do this as part of their forwarding service.
        
           | throwaway81523 wrote:
           | Storing email as ciphertext makes it awfully hard to search.
           | You really want to store it as plaintext on a computer that
           | you control. Historically that meant your client computer.
           | Storing email on servers (even your own) seems like asking
           | for trouble, though it can work if you control the server and
           | are careful enough.
        
         | kube-system wrote:
         | When all of my email is accessible in one place, it is very
         | easy to use that data to generate a model of my activity. Yes,
         | the recipients of my email probably won't protect it well, but
         | it's distributed across multiple providers.
         | 
         | I know that data will likely be mined from my email at one end
         | or the other, but I might as well not serve it up on a silver
         | platter.
        
           | throwaway81523 wrote:
           | > When all of my email is accessible in one place, it is very
           | easy to use that data to generate a model of my activity.
           | Yes, the recipients of my email probably won't protect it
           | well, but it's distributed across multiple providers.
           | 
           | Chances are that most (> 50%) of it is on one provider
           | (gmail), or maybe two or three providers. Getting those will
           | make almost as good a profile of you as getting everything.
           | And it's not just your email: it's also the stuff that you
           | communicate in it, that can further spread among careless
           | recipients, unless you live your life like a paranoid
           | fugitive and silo all your information including (e.g.) from
           | your family members. That, in turn, is completely neurosis
           | inducing. It's a conundrum that I don't have an answer to,
           | beyond "surveillance sucks".
        
         | ppseafield wrote:
         | If you opt to send an encrypted message outside of Tutanota,
         | first you set a password, then it sends a link to a special
         | inbox where the user can use the password to log in and reply.
         | The message's contents don't ever get sent in the clear, and
         | only their encrypted contents get stored on Tutanota's servers.
        
           | throwaway81523 wrote:
           | That's not really email then (in the sense of interoperating
           | with the email standards). It's more like a web based private
           | message system with everything on one server. In that case
           | though, why store anything on servers at all? Store
           | everything on the clients instead. I believe there are some
           | systems that do that.
        
         | dane-pgp wrote:
         | > the weakest link will usually be at the other person's end
         | (and out of your control)
         | 
         | By that logic, no one should ever switch from an insecure
         | service to a secure service. The advantage of being backwards
         | compatible with email is that you don't lose anything by
         | upgrading, and for some messages you do gain something. (You
         | shouldn't change your behaviour based on a false sense of
         | security, though).
         | 
         | Ideally, the person you are communicating with would use PGP,
         | for example if their provider is ProtonMail, so you could have
         | end-to-end encrypted communication without having to worry
         | about keyservers or encryption settings. Unfortunately,
         | however, Tutanota has chosen not to use PGP because of fears of
         | "attacks from quantum computers"[0]. Of course, their own
         | proprietary system is vulnerable to those attacks too, but
         | that's a minor details, and you should ignore it...
         | 
         | [0] https://tutanota.com/faq/#pgp
        
       | nojs wrote:
       | I want to like Tutanota but the UI is really bad. Basic things
       | like search, threaded emails, resizing/changing the viewport are
       | buggy or impossible and there's no alternative desktop client. I
       | don't think it's a realistic option for heavy email users at the
       | moment.
        
         | iechoz6H wrote:
         | That and the name, I got tired of;                   "Tooter
         | what?"         "Tutanota."         "Can you spell that please?"
        
           | culi wrote:
           | They let you use @tuta.io
        
           | kube-system wrote:
           | Just use a custom domain. This is generally a good idea
           | anyway; you can take your address to any email provider
           | whenever you want.
        
         | russdpale wrote:
         | yeh this is why I unsubscribed. The UI is simply awful.
        
           | BerlinInterface wrote:
           | It's the Berlin, or Hannover, probably, cynicism. If they
           | can't have a good mileu, you can't have any good things, as a
           | client or user. Berlin and Hannover are cynical people you
           | know! < 3
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-22 23:02 UTC)