Stick a fork in them, they're done. At least with that name they are. Easiest thing would be to disolve, and start a brand new company with the same people.<p>Don't get me wrong, whether they have or don't have intelligence ties is irrelevant. No one serious uses them, they're a general public supplier, and the general public is about as brave as a gringo cop, i.e.: not much.<p>So they're about to lose a chunk of customers and Tutanota's leadership isn't exactly quality so who knows what they'll do.
I'm not a fan of Tuta, mainly because of their disingenuous advertising where they keep calling themselves "open source" when they in fact only open source their clients but keep anything server-side under wraps -- but for this reason this also makes me skeptical; if their clients are indeed open source (which I assume is true, I haven't verified), and all encryption happens client-side before being sent to the server (also an assumption), how would it even be possible for this to be true?<p>In my understanding, anything that Tuta potentially did to compromise e-mails would necessarily have to shine through in their open source client code -- unless they willingly serve binaries that are not actually built from that code, which of course would be a scandal.<p>So even if I don't like them, I'm going to need something more concrete than someone simply <i>saying</i> they have "intelligence ties" to be willing to believe that they are somehow duping their users.
It's such a bad service, I don't know why anyone uses it. ProtonMail is superior in every way.<p>Tuta has all kind of weird restrictions, like not being able to search back more than a month.
Similar allegations were removed from r/privacy as fake news: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/17st6yu/tutanota_is_a_honeypot_according_to_a_cbc_article/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/17st6yu/tutanota_i...</a>
> "This would completely contradict our mission as a privacy protection organization."<p>no shit, but the claim is that you aren't...
It seems obvious Five Eyes will not tolerate or legitimize any email provider that doesn't allow them access to subpoenas, at the very least - this rules out most of the privacy features touted by protonmail & tutanota (no logs, E2E encryption, etc).<p>Perhaps what makes the ruse convincing in Tutanota's case is the crappy interface and clear dearth of basic features: search basically doesn't work; it's impossible to select all messages or use shift to select pages of messages. Their excuse is that customers might accidentally delete emails, but it might make more sense that they want to retain as much data as possible: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/nc9jxx/suggestion_select_all_to_select_mail/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/nc9jxx/suggestion...</a>
While I tend to assume the vast majority of privacy is either imagined or a façade, I also have a deep enough distrust of authority that when I see such a claim made by a government, or government official, I'm inclined to believe it's a ploy to discredit someone that won't cooperate with them.