Tutanota vs Proton Mail
Tutanota vs Proton Mail
I've been using Tutanota for a while now. Been interested in people's opinions about Tutanota and Protonmail.
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Tutanota doesn't share their security audits, which Proton does.
Also, IIRC Tutanota uses their own custom encryption implementation, while Proton contributes to open source OpenPGP projects.
And when in the past the the Swiss gov ordered Proton to do some limited tracking for a specific user, after that they went to the court and succeeded in changing the law so it's no longer possible to order this tracking.
Proton might not be ideal, but they seem to actually care about making the Internet a safer place.
I am sure that Tutanota does not use any custom encryption algorithm. It is clearly stated in the FAQ that they use RSA (with PFS) and AES to encrypt emails exchanged between Tutanota users. https://tutanota.com/encryption There's even a section which discusses why they do not use PGP. So it's not like they can't add it, they just don't because it lacks "important requirements". Plus they even are slowly developing a protocol that is post-quantum secure to encrypt their emails with.
I'm not really saying that what Tutanota does is insecure, but historically doing security on your own instead of using established standards has not been a winning move.
Plus their unwillingness to open source it and not sharing the audits just doesn't inspire my confidence.Overall they're probably fine, but these are some of the main reasons I ultimately chose Proton instead.
BTW, they're not "slowly developing" post-quantum encryption, they're just saying they may do that at some point in the future - which everyone will have to do anyway when we get to this point.
Plus their unwillingness to open source it and not sharing the audits just doesn’t inspire my confidence.
The server side isn't open source, and you can't verify that is what is actually running in production. While we do recommend it I don't personally use their products.I like the use of email clients, particularly customized to my needs.
Nested folders was only a very recent feature added https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/subfolders and without that I wouldn't even consider a provider as I use this for organization. Of course as you can't use your own email client, downloading email from Tutanota can be a bit of a pain too, you can only export per-folder into Mbox.
I am sure that Tutanota does not use any custom encryption algorithm. It is clearly stated in the FAQ that they use RSA (with PFS) and AES to encrypt emails exchanged between Tutanota users. https://tutanota.com/encryption
These are only primitive algorithms, the actual implementation is custom and specific to Tutanota, which mean it will only work with Tutanota as nothing else will implement it.
There is no way to do key distribution outside of Tutanota's service.