Is it good? Are there any better alternatives?
Ive lost two accounts due to being inactive on them so I kinda gave up trying
Posteo is the gold standard for me. They are absolutely solid in terms of values while making no big fuss about their (excellent) work - other than Tuta and Proton.
I just swapped from proton to mailbox.org and I considered tuta heavily.
I chose mailbox over tuta because:
- tuta didn’t allow third party clients like thunderbird. Given I jumped to proton from Gmail and now mailbox from proton, I wanted to decouple as many systems as possible if I had to jump again.
- mailbox, if I’m remembering correctly, had better encryption properties except for their calendar. Tuta has an encrypted calendar, and now I’m looking into a self-hosted calendar system.
I think I would still recommend tuta to like my mother or something because it’s very clean and easy to set up and good enough. I’d recommend mailbox.org as a slightly harder alternative if you care about your calendar being encrypted.
My opinion on tuta: Can I use thunderbird? No? Goodbye.
There are many alternatives, but given that I haven’t switched from a trash free one as I don’t want to spend money for just having a mail server, it would be hypocritical to recommend any.
I have used it a couple years now and I don’t have anything to complain. It has worked perfectly fine all the time.
I paid for it for years but it’s just too limited. Inbox rules suck. Tags technically exist but are half baked.
Searching your tuta inbox is terrible. By default it sets the search window to a few days, and searching your entire inbox takes (not exaggerating) ~1000x as long as any other provider I’ve used. Where I expect a few seconds it takes tens of minutes to search a time window of ~1 month which for me might be ~1000 emails total.
I don’t like it because you can’t use the mail address in any mail app. Only in their app or in the browser.
So when they dropped app support for my phone I had to use the web version. But then they also dropped the support for that.
Just like Microsoft they are declaring a perfectly fine phone (MS with PCs) obsolete and make it unusable (MS W11). All in the name of “Security”. (Even though you can access the web version of tuta on a PC running Windows XP, a >20 year old OS. I have tried that in a VM after I couldn’t access it on my phone. How hypocritical.)
I am not going to start my PC just to check my emails. I have deleted my account.
What phone do you have?
iPhone 7. iOS 15.8.5 Last updated 15th September 2025
Well, your device is pretty old
Apple and every app I use still support it. Just tuta decided to ditch it.
paid for a year a while back when they had some discount. will not renew.
like others have said:
- no standard protocols support to use other clients and their clients are shit
- no client improvement in the last year
- their pricing buckets are weird and the price per gigabyte is too high
it’s a niche product. if e2ee is the primary goal, that’s fine. it’s not what most people want/need. as far as I see it, we lack a good service with no tracking/mining and tuta is just too much limiting.
At some point I used to pay for it (I have a costum domain), but then I ran out of money and couldn’t pay. I had the old price too, which was 12 Euros a year.
Now I think the price is the same as proton so if I were to pay for email again, I would probably get proton instead, because proton supports GPG and I think tuta doesn’t.
In the end it doesn’t matter because 100% of my contacts either use gmail, outlook or some business server and I don’t know anyone who uses GPG.
I use them, and recommend them. Full E2EE is my number one requirement - after learning what can be done with just metadata.
Lack of 3rd party clients doesn’t bother me.
That they allow integration with your phone’s contacts app is a big win - Proton don’t allow that.
Payed for 5 years, but now I’m in the progress of migrating to a “regular” mailservice. Problems I have with tuta: The client has become super slow in recent months, it seems to get worse and worse. Notifications don’t arrive or arrive too late (Android). No other way than to use it with their clients. No offline support (or at least it doesn’t work for me). UI/UX isn’t that great either.
Would you recommend it as a secondary service?
Depends on your needs. It’s reasonable for mails you don’t need instantly or offline, but at the same time should be encrypted at rest. I don’t know if there is a new pricing model now, but I have paid 1€ a month, so basically nothing. If you don’t mind the downsides and encryption is important to you, it’s a very fair price I think.
It’s slow as hell to load and as the other commenter said search is horribly slow. I’m not even exaggerating when I say I spent an hour waiting to load an email from a year or two ago.
Love tuta. Esp. the encrypted calendar. some parts Could use some love, but i pay to support that. I used posteo some time ago but found it very annoying in comparision.
I prefer it over gmail and outlook, but as others have said, it leaves a bit to be desired
Doesn’t allow third party email clients.
I don’t mind non 3rd party, I want it for secondary email for now.
Posteo is paid only unfortunately:(
Fortunate for me, Posteo is a pair service so that their employees can live a good life by working. I get their service. I pay. I don’t like someone else paying for me then show me ads or sell my data.
LOL. Thats kinda absurd. So many people seem to recommend it but…
Most people don’t need 3rd party clients and just use the web interface or wtv is the native app for the product they are using. Using thunderbird or K9 clients for example is a fringe use case for most people anyway.
I’m not sure I would call using a third-party email client a ‘fringe’ use case. As of yesterday, Thunderbird has 10,992,366 active daily installations. Sure, it’s probably not as many as mobile clients, but that’s still a helluva lot of people using it.
Yeah, only nutty fringe dwellers would want to use an email client to manage their email. /s
I’ve been on Posteo for years now, they’ve been rock solid. As for Tuta.io, the issue specifically is no IMAP support, which is what third party email clients need to function.
I thought I’d also mention Protonmail, which might look good, but is in a similar boat. They technically do provide IMAP support, but not in a way that matters. If you wanted to connect Protonmail to Thunderbird or, if you’re an insane person, Microsoft Outlook, you’d need another app running on your PC along with your email app called Proton Bridge, which just sounds like a hassle. No mobile version either.
I’d say stick with Posteo. Alternatively, if you want to use your own domain name, I’ve heard good things about mailbox.org.
Just to clarify - Protonmail does have a mobile app (works great by the way, especially on Graphene)
My bad, I wasn’t clear enough. I actually meant Proton Bridge has no mobile version, meaning you can only use the official app you mentioned, but not any third party apps like K-9 Mail/Thunderbird or FairEmail.
Aw yeah that makes sense actually on rereading it. I think i was going to try the Proton Bridge at first on moving to Linux but then saw it was only available via their paid version.
That put me off lol, so I’m just sticking to using it via browser and their own mobile app for now.
I deleted my Protonmail after learning about their metadata filtering practices. The more you learn about Proton the sketchier they seem.
Source, pretty please? I’d like to read up.
Their privacy policy expressly states they have access to metadata and they have a non-public blacklist which filters “undesirable” domains. Try creating an account on zlibrary using your Protonmail.
Also worthy of notice, they are legally forced to hand over shitloads of user data as seen in their transparency report.
Not to be a tinfoil hat guy, there’s good reason for this and there’s no free email service that is much better privacy-wise. The actual content of your mails are probably safe with Proton.
Their privacy policy states the obvious, and repeats what’s in the SMTP RFC (821). I can only guess this is because of transparency. All email providers have access to that information. I would actually argue for them that they are better at letting people know which kind of data they do and don’t have access to.
Every (email) service is bound to the law of the country they reside or operate in. Proton has part of its offerings in Switzerland, part in EU (Germany if I recall well). Swiss FADP is very close to GDPR. Also when it comes to privacy protection. Every company bound to GDPR (or FADP) has to abide to the law, and when law enforcement has a good reason to check out user data, and the judge agrees, any company has to provide evidence. Even non-EU based companies offering services in EU. With their transparency report they are providing a tool to their users to know and understand what happens to their data in a lawful manner. And I see that as a win for transparency.
But this is just my opinion, and it is ok to not agree with how I see the world.
I don’t disagree and like I said, you won’t find much better free privacy-oriented email services. Their filter is rather heavy-handed when it comes to “undesirable” domains and as a pirate I’ve run into it enough to seek other services.
Your view of the world is quite reasonable, I think!
AFAIK 3rd party clients not supported cause of lack e2e encryption support
There is a small important distinction.
It is because there is no proprietary e2e encryption by default exclusively while communicating with others on tuta.
E2e encryption for 99.99999% of emails is via passworded pgp that everyone else has and uses or not encrypted at all. I have tuta for years and have yet to send or recieve a single encrypted mail that is the reason that they can’t have a 3rd party app outside of tuta’s own advertisements I get served.
It is vendor lock in. Pure, plain, and simple.
Wouldn’t be as much of a problem if their client wasn’t so bad. No auto moving messages as far as I can tell, absolutely horrid search functionality where I can type the sender email word for word and it will find 0 results, and just having almost no productivity or inbox managing features in general
I still think it would be better to give the user freedom, and just give a warning that there are privacy risks.
