I’ve been looking to switch from gmail to a different email provider that’s more private. I’ve been hearing about Tuta, are there any drawbacks to it? Are there better options?

For a while I was planning on making the switch to protonmail but that’s off the table now due to the recent events surrounding them.

      • Termight@lemmy.mlEnglish
        31·
        21 hours ago

        What’s the practical takeaway here? Just don’t have an email basically

        @[email protected] The takeaway here is not “don’t use email at all.” You can employ OpenPGP, and encrypt your emails. Also, host your own keys. Perhaps don’t allow a single corporation to have your private key and access to your encrypted messages simultaneously.

      • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
        2·
        19 hours ago

        Take control of your data. Host your own email or use a provider that cares about your privacy.

        We talk about this so often in privacy communities because, although emails are particularly difficult to secure, they’re so important. Swapping your email provider or hosting your own is so easy to say and so hard to do, but so worth doing. I would suggest taking some steps towards FLOSS/FOSS and other privacy-friendly options in other areas first to get used to the idea of change and some of the difficulties you’ll handle in that realm

  • brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml
    151·
    2 days ago

    I’ve used Tuta for years, paid account with multiple custom domains.

    I prefer them for their principles, but their clients are extremely frustrating. Emails load very slowly and their email search is basically unusable.

    I’ve resorted to downloading old emails and using other clients to import and search through them. I really wish they would improve their email search.

      • brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml
        2·
        20 hours ago

        I should re-iterate I download the emails to use in an offline client. Their service doesn’t support third party clients to receive and send email.

        When I do taxes, I need to search thousands of emails for receipts and the tuta apps make this impossible. This is my workaround.

          • brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml
            2·
            13 hours ago

            My bad. Its been a while, but Thunderbird at one point. If I remember right there was an update relatively recently that made it much more difficult to import offline emails, so if you find a better alternative let me know.

            • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              10 hours ago

              Hmm, I wonder if Betterbird has solved that problem… I’ve actually only ever used webmail as I didn’t understand the benefit of a desktop platform—until these (increasingly) privacy-invasive times!

  • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2911·
    2 days ago

    In comparison to Gmail? Yes, but that’s a very low bar to clear. You need to be aware that Tuta are currently enshittifying. The product is getting worse and the price increases. It’s slow, but it’s happening. I switched to disroot.org after 2 years of Tuta because I got fed up with it.

    It is in my Scrolls of Grudge, and I quote:

    Ads in web UI for paying user.
    Made it hard to cancel payment.
    Newsletter is just upselling.
    Can’t unsub from newsletter.

    • Sarcasmo220@lemmy.ml
      161·
      1 day ago

      I am a paid user of Tuta and I have never seen any ads. Where did you see them and what kind of ads?

      • perishthethought@lemm.eeEnglish
        143·
        1 day ago

        _drkt provided no proof of Tuta’s enshittification. There are no paid ads for third party products in any Tuta UI. Don’t panic yet. Read all the comments here, maybe.

        • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          152·
          1 day ago

          no paid ads for third party products

          Haha you almost fucking got me, I actually wrote a whole thing about how those are ads but then I read your comment again and noticed that clever little write-off. Ads for their own products are still ads and I don’t want to fucking see it. Get that shit off my eyeballs, I paid for this product.

          The newsletter is an ad, it’s not news. They’re just advertising their products to you and you can’t unsubscribe and you can’t ignore it because they very deliberately have a special styling for the newsletters that makes it stand out from normal emails.

          I don’t know why you want to defend this company. I’m glad you’re okay with the level of shitty behavior they engage in; it’s definitely less than most email providers do- I’m just letting people know that Tuta aren’t angels. They’re a company, and they used to be better. Proton was exactly the same. It was a good service and then it became shitty.

          I would love to log back in and show you the 3 separate buttons on my UI that did nothing except link to a “Please pay us for this feature” page because I was a legacy premium user because I didn’t want all those new bullshit they made. I stress that it’s not a case of them implementing a button in the UI for all users and because I’m a legacy user I get it too even if I can’t use it- the buttons had special CSS to make them stand out. They were ads. Why couldn’t Tuta just leave me alone? I could still be paying them to this day if they had just not gone down that path. I just want an email that is an email and nothing more and doesn’t get in my way. Tuta had that, and then they took it away and asked for more money to put it back.

          I think the misunderstanding here is that I was a legacy premium user. I was paying less to get only the email+calendar because that’s what I signed up for, originally. When people sign up today, that’s not an option. People who are new to Tuta (relatively) haven’t seen this change happen and haven’t witnessed how obviously desperate Tuta was to get people off the legacy premium plan.

          Also my name is drkt_ but I’m sure you tried your best.

          • Libb@jlai.luEnglish
            63·
            1 day ago

            Get that shit off my eyeballs, I paid for this product.

            You should try Proton, then /s

            Proton constantly tries to push you to upgrade to their next plaid plan too. So much so that this coupled with still zero fucking support for Proton Drive under Linux are the two reasons I have cancelled my paid Proton plan… and I had been paying for years.

            edit: typos

            • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              21·
              23 hours ago

              Yeah, I know! Don’t say that too loud, though. Proton and Tuta are the precious baby boys who can do no wrong in most “privacy” communities.

              • Libb@jlai.luEnglish
                2·
                22 hours ago

                Those two services have strengths but they also have some drawbacks, that are more or less painful depending one’s needs. If there are people out there who feel so empty that they can’t stand any critics concerning a product they think is great, well, what can I say? I’m so sorry for them.

  • aleq@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know if tuta and posteo have some special privacy features, but if you’re just looking for a non-gmail provider I’ve been very happy with fastmail. It’s an Australian provider with a good track record afaik.

    Would also highly recommend getting your own domain if you can, so your address doesn’t belong to whichever provider you choose.

    • countrypunk@slrpnk.netOP
      31·
      2 days ago

      I’m in the US. I wonder if there’s any drawback to using an Australian provider. Like, will it get flagged or something?

      • EvenOdds@lemm.ee
        4·
        1 day ago

        If it’s Australian, don’t expect strong privacy. But then again, I wouldn’t expect that from a US based email provider either.

        Source: am Australian.

  • bl4kers@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Yes, I use it and generally like it. Their app is a little buggy, but they have email support and accept bug reports on GitHub. This is helpful for finding out what other users are seeing. It’s a small dev team with frequent releases

    • countrypunk@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      Do you know if there’s a difference in the frequency of releases of the f-droid version and the play store version?

  • feoh@lemmy.ml
    101·
    22 hours ago

    It’s not Tuta but I adore Fastmail.

    No BS. No gimmicks. Just privacy aware, protocol conformant E-mail at a reasonable price.

  • 18107@aussie.zoneEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    I’ve had a bug with the android app where sometimes notifications for emails just don’t happen. I’ve received a new email notification, opened the app, and found that the notification was for an email received 5 hours ago, and I didn’t get any notification for the email 3 days ago or the email 1 hour ago.

    Despite this issue and several other minor issues, I still recommend Tuta. Mostly because I can’t find anything better.

    • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websiteEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      If you’re on Android, by any chance, have you gone through all the battery optimization, background process killing, and startup settings? Some OEM’s versions of Android are real bad in that way. Giving the app the right settings and permissions may decrease the number of delayed notifications like that.

      • 18107@aussie.zoneEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        I am using Android until I can find an alternative. I’ve turned off all optimisations I can find. I haven’t had the issue in a few weeks, but it did happen once since changing settings. I’m hoping that something random I did (like a phone restart) somehow fixed everything.

  • serendipity@aussie.zone
    2·
    16 hours ago

    If you don’t want to run your own mail server then there will always be a trade off somewhere. That trade off could be high costs to pay a tech firm to run a private mail server for you, could be lack of features, could be privacy, could be a lot of things. Even with your own mail server there will be trade offs around security etc. depending upon your skillset.

    Personally, I have a hybrid approach.

    • Business is on a mail server
    • Personal with sensitive data (health, bills, etc.) is on a mail server
    • Personal - subscriptions, newsletters, etc. is on Proton
    • Everything else is on Gmail

    I also have other accounts (e.g. DDG, Apple Mail, for specific use cases, but I forward the content I receive there into Gmail.

    I’ve had a look at Tuta and haven’t seen enough to convince me to move anything there. I’m not going to move my mail servers to a cloud provider, Gmail is there because the address is 20 years’ old and I can’t be bothered updating everywhere that it’s used, and Proton has been great for years, has grown well, and has a corporate mission that I agree with. DDG, Apple Mail etc. is what the internet sees of me - They generate unique email addresses and then I forward the content I want into Gmail, or sometimes Proton.