As days go by, more & more red flags are raised over an individual’s privacy over the Web. In the past, What’s New On The Net has reported on all kinds of new encrypted Online services & forms of communications including the email.
Our team recently came across Tutanota, a free Webmail service built by German engineers that claims to “take your privacy to the next level”. End-to-end encryption & open source are the key features of this browser-based service, also available as Android & iOS apps. Tutanota lets users send encrypted emails to anyone with just a couple of taps.
The simple sign up only asks for a user name & a password. No one asks you for anything else, be it an email address or phone number. The Site even lets users register via Tor to maximize anonymity.
Explains Matthias Pfau, co-founder & developer, while speaking to this Website: My aim is to fight mass surveillance. I write code to fight for our human right to privacy. Our aim is to create a cloud service which is so easy to use and so secure that it locks out all the spies. We really deserve it.
Encrypted emails need to be the standard, not the exception. Surveillance of our Online communication is constantly increasing, simply because it’s technologically so easy. We want to stop this and allow people to keep their private data private by encrypting all data automatically. If we want to keep our freedom and our free democracies, we have to stop the intrusion of our private communication online. Encrypted emails need to be the standard, not the exception”, adds Arne Möhle, co-founder & developer, Tutanota.
The Tutanota teams claims that users can rest in the knowledge that all of their data – contacts, emails, attachments – are stored encrypted along with their passwords. In contrast to Gmail, data profiling is not possible with Tutanota, they say. Users own your data in all senses, says the team.
Tutanota is licensed under GPL v3 – essential to any security service.
“What’s even better”, continues Matthias, “is that the end-to-end encrypted messages do not travel the Internet like normal emails. They are always exchanged between the user & the Tutanota servers directly, thus, making them “invisible” to organizations monitoring the Internet. Recipients outside Tutanota access their messages via a notification email & can reply with an encrypted message without having to sign up. Of course, users may also send & receive normal emails just like with any other provider.”
In so far as the Tutanota apps are concerned, they encrypt on the go & are “incredibly easy” to use. You can access your encrypted emails from any device. For business customers, Tutanota also offers an Outlook plugin that is also compatible with the apps. Upon writing a new email you simply tap on a little lock symbol to decide whether it should be encrypted or not.
While using Tutanota, the provider can’t see anything, they can’t even reset your password, so it makes sense to store the latter somewhere.
By the end of July, Tutanota also plans to offer a premium version to help users use it with their own domains.
“We have decided that we do not want to live in a world with massive spying on innocent individuals. That’s why Tutanota will be forever free with 1 GB of free storage”, says Arne Möhle. “All data is encrypted locally on the user’s device before being transmitted to our German-based servers. The data cannot be accessed by anybody. Not even we have access. This also means that we cannot reset passwords. Since we cannot access user data, we cannot hand it over. Your emails with Tutanota are private and stay private.”
Image Credit: Tutanota
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