How many of you have switched from ProtonMail to Tuta?

General
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I’m thinking about doing this soon. I feel like Proton has just done a few things in poor taste. Most recently this VPN A-B testing stuff. Calling Monero a shitcoin. Now this Chromium based browser instead of focusing on making their calendar good or even just open sourcing the Calendar app (which they said they were gonna do like four years ago).The state of the Linux drive client. I could go on.

Don’t get me wrong, I think their email is a genuinely great product, but I can’t help but feel like the company is… not the best?

Tuta on the other hand feels way more aligned with the privacy / security / FLOSS community. Their commitment to never use AI in their end products. Love that they use green energy too. Their vibe is honestly just so much better.

One thing is for sure, I will be going to a custom domain this time. No way I am ever changing email addresses again migrating from Proton.

How do you guys feel about this? Am I being dramatic or is this something we should discuss?

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i am one of the weirdos still using pgp to encrypt my emails (when possible)

proton does this automatically for their users sending me email (retrieving my pubkey). i can retrieve pubkeys from proton users to encrypt my emails to them aswell. that works cause they use pgp for that which is an open source standard

on the other hand tuta developed their own encryption method and built a kind of walled garden. only tuta users can automatically encrypt emails between each other, so if you’re outside their ecosystem you lose that seamless encryption layer that comes with an open standard like pgp

i don’t use proton nor tuta. this is just from my humble perspective

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I used both for a while, and while people may feel Tuta aligns more with their values (in some ways, mine too), in my opinion, their products are just worse than Proton’s in almost every way.

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For email, i prefer Tuta over proton. I especialy like their app for pc and also on Android.

I like minimalist approach, so other users may disagree.

If like me you use pc more than phone, then Tuta is great !

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i don’t mind having more options in general as long as they don’t lose their soul.

i use Proton VPN and Drive and they work fine. not that good on Linux but they are (software-wise) getting better, as most companies might not even support Linux

worth the money so far, i have Tuta mail, not because Proton is Bad, i just don’t want a single company handling my IP AND MAIL

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Proton cleans up URLs and also, as I understand, loads emails through a Proton server.

Does Tuta do either of these? My understanding they do not, namely because the latter would be resource intensive.

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Whoa, Proton called Monero a shitcoin? I wasn’t aware of that. I knew their wallet was BTC-only and they ignored suggestions to add BCH, XMR, and ZEC on their user voice site, but I wasn’t aware their laser-eyed BTC-maximalism was that strong.

To the topic at hand, I don’t like that Proton and Tuta are incompatible with regular email clients, and I don’t feel any more security is granted by using them vs. a standard email service that respects user privacy since 100% of my email correspondence is with counterparties outside their walled gardens. Email is just not a secure method of communication, and I don’t really count messages that never leave the walled garden as “email,” exactly. At that point it’s just a glorified, centralized messaging service built on top of email protocol.

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I will probably get a mailbox.org address or similar at some point. Right now I have a self hosted email server that I use for family and and have been otherwise emailing from behind a duck alias. I should probably make my duck aliases point at free tuta email or my server instead, but it’s not like they benefit from my “support” when I’m a free user.

I appreciate tuta’s encryption of sender and message headers, but my inclination is just to set up pop3 so that it’s not stored on a server long term at all. This should be easier than self hosting an email server and also makes the cheapest tier ($12 per year) viable.

Proton email is an excellent product though, even at free tier. If I was going to pick one proton product to use, it would be that one, while unlimited continues to be a great value for what it offers.

Edit: I got tuta set up, though they have a review period. The UI seems pretty good for email and calendar. I’ll consider subscribing to it over mailbox if I like it enough.

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There is a lot of dirt being thrown at Proton and a lot of people are dragged into it. Follow your own judgement and don’t listen too much to the internet cloud. There are people who’s sole purpose is to drag proton down and you would be asking yourself who benefits from this. Like everything you need to be resilient and don’t let be influenced 1-2-3.

Tuta mail lacks a lot of functionalities of Proton, it’s is maybe good/better at emailing, but for the mobile app for example. It uses the same pass for the app as for your phone. So it provides less security. Protons login code is independent from your phone code.

the best is to use more than just proton for your services. Proton is by far the best email provider for non-tech savy people. Tuta is at the same level.

Don’t let people fool you.

Also proton as a larger company has far more exposure than any other company. You wil never hear about the flaws of unknown/small companies because frankly nobody cares as much.

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I am really struggling to find a source for this.

The closest I got was their Wallet Twitter account responding to a user teasing a statement on shitcoins out of them, where they only took the word from said user.

To me it is highly questionable that they meant to include XMR in that blanket statement, as the parent tweet appears to provoke a response toward actual shitcoins.

Please provide me with a source for another quote, as I am genuinely interested.

Edit: I have further investigated this and hit nothing new, but a more likely origin of the narrative:

Techlore’s first impression after the announcement of Proton Wallet.

Here is the video with a timestamp (@04:34), where he addresses the tweet I already found.

Unfortunately, it seems he misses the context of Proton’s tweet, which again, was taken from the tweet of a user they replied to.

He shows Proton’s blog post, though, where they used “altcoins”, providing more evidence that “shitcoin” was not their original wording or attitude toward Monero.

Proton also carefully commented about their consideration of altcoin adoption on Reddit at that time.

As far as I’m concerned, since I can not find any more evidence to the “shitcoin” claim, I consider this false until further evidence comes up.

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Proton VPN accused of running price sensitivity testing (A/B Testing) on their customers
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My main issue with Tuta compared to Proton is that Tuta doesn’t support third-party email clients like Thunderbird for clean local archiving.

With Proton and Proton Bridge, you can move emails directly into Thunderbird’s Local Folders to free up server space while keeping your account in a cheaper storage tier.

With Tuta, you’re forced to use their official client to manually export emails to your hard drive and then delete them from the server, losing the ability to view and search those archives inside an email app.

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For what it’s worth, you can do that with mailbox.org, get the same pgp encryption, and pay less.

Also proton as a larger company has far more exposure than any other company. You wil never hear about the flaws of unknown/small companies because frankly nobody cares as much.

Agreed. They are under a crazy amount of scrutiny, which means they de facto are held to a higher standard. In reality, they are doing a lot of good work.

My only real issue with them is deceptive pricing, aggressive marketing, inconsistent messaging to the public. None of these are true to an extreme degree, but more than tuta, mailbox, ipvn, and so on.

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Well, Proton gives more for free and I have multiple accounts so honestly I use it more than Tuta But like besides that there’s not really like any other reason.
I do like Tuta because you can select more mail domain addys though.

oh yea then one of the things I dislike about Tuta is that I believe your account will get deleted if you’ve not logged in for I think six months compared to Proton whose log in time is longer (12 months) which i guess is kinda a petty reason, but yea like Proton just offers more for free(5gb drive storage + 1gb mail storage) and I am one of those people that hate tying things to like monthly subscriptions so I just use whatever I can get.

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Good point. Tuta is less interoperable in numerous ways

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How many of you have switched from ProtonMail to Tuta?

I don’t know how many, but I’ve not switched. Tuta is good and I use it for the ad-hoc non main account.

This “stuff” has been around for a long time. And it isn’t going to change. It’s business.

Source?

Agreed. There are more pressing issues they could be focussing on rather than taking on everything. I can’t help but feel they take their products out of the oven just a tad early before it’s risen.

In this such an issue of done in the correct way? “AI”, as is colloquially known and coined, is not going anywhere. Get ahead or fall behind…

Ever so slightly. How long have you used Proton for? They haven’t changed significantly as long as I’ve known them. But then perhaps that’s your point - one of which I can get on board with.

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The proton free services are indeed very generous. I would be dissapointed if projects like proton pass, proton authenticator, proton docs, and more ended. I don’t see myself migrating away from Proton entirely, which makes feel like I should subscribe to something from them just to throw some money their way.

I however suspect this business model relates directly to the aggressive marketing I dislike. If the free services are too good, it’s possible not enough people will subscribe without manipulation.

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What on Earth are you saying?

If something is “too good” then it’s worth paying for, no?

No one can pay staff with fairy dust.

What do you mean by “manipulation”?

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If something is “too good” then it’s worth paying for, no?

This is not how most people think. They would rather pay as little as possible and get the best bargain. Someone like this sees no point in subbing if the free service is good enough.

Proton needs their money, as proton is continually trying to bring in as many new users as possible. Therefore it isn’t sustainable to them if too many of their users are satisfied with free. Their solution appears to be aggressive marketing.

I consider most marketing a type of manipulation.

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Ill voice an argument to the contrary. Email aliases are the email privacy feature I value the most. And I’ve found Proton Mail/Vault integration with SimpleLogin to be unmatched by other viable email providers, Tuta included

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