Tuta (email)

Tuta, formerly Tutanota, is an end-to-end encrypted email app and a freemium secure email service. The service is advertisement-free; it relies on donations and premium subscriptions. As of June 2023, Tutanota's owners claimed to have over 10 million users of the product. The company announced a transition to 100% renewable electricity in March 2019. This decision coincided with employee participation in Fridays for Future protests.

History
Tutanota is derived from Latin and contains the words "tuta" and "nota" which means "secure message". Tutao GmbH was founded in 2011 in Hanover, Germany.

The goal of the developers for Tuta 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.

Since 2014, the software has been open-sourced and can be reviewed by outsiders on GitHub.

In August 2018, Tuta 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.

In November 2020, the Cologne court ordered monitoring of a single Tuta account that had been used for an extortion attempt. The monitoring function should only apply to future unencrypted emails this account receives and it will not affect emails previously received.

On 7 November 2023, Tutanota announced it was rebranded to simply 'Tuta'. The former domain name tutanota.com now redirects to the shorter tuta.com.

On 11 November 2023, it was alleged that Tuta was being used as a honeypot for criminals with a backdoor from authorities. An ex-RCMP officer, Cameron Ortis, testified that the service was used as a storefront to lure criminals in and gain information on those who fell for it. He stated authorities were monitoring the whole service, feeding it to Five Eyes, which would disperse it back to the RCMP in order to gain more knowledge about the criminal underground. However, no evidence was ever presented to back up this statement, and Tuta refuted the claim.

Encryption
Tuta offers end-to-end encryption for emails sent from one Tuta user to another. Tuta also encrypts all emails and contacts stored in their servers, "except for email addresses of users as well as senders and recipients of emails" and "date of an email sent or received". Emails sent non-encrypted, are encrypted only between the Tuta user and Tuta servers, and then sent unencrypted to destination user.

Tuta uses a standardized, hybrid method consisting of a symmetrical and an asymmetrical algorithm - AES with a length of 256 bit and RSA with 2048 bit. To external recipients who do not use Tuta a notification is sent with a link to a temporary Tuta account. After entering a previously exchanged password, the recipient can read the message and reply end-to-end encrypted.

Account deletion
Tuta deletes free accounts that have not been logged into for 6 months. According to Tuta, this happens because of security reasons and for keeping the service free.

Tuta has also been GDPR compliant since 2018.

Censorship
Tuta has been blocked in Egypt since October 2019, and blocked in Russia since February 2020 for unknown reasons (although believed to be tied to recent actions against services operating outside of the country, especially those that involve encrypted communications).

Future
Tuta is working on a cloud storage platform named "TutaDrive" with a focus on post-quantum cryptography. The project, officially named "PQDrive - Development of a Post-Quantum Encrypted Online Storage," is funded by the German government's KMU-innovativ program (€1.5 million), which supports Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) like Tuta. The project receives further support through a €600,000 collaboration with the University of Wuppertal, which will play a key role in research and development.