Proton Mail versus Tuta

Questions
24

I found the issue. It still appears to be a problem Manual key verification · Issue #768 · tutao/tutanota · GitHub.
Their blogpost also mentions this: “As one of the next steps, we will also add key verification so that TutaCrypt will also provide cryptographically guaranteed authentication.”
This is their issue about PGP: Autocrypt support · Issue #198 · tutao/tutanota · GitHub. One interesting thing is:
“You could, in fact, generate a PGP keypair for your Tuta address via GPG on your local machine, but in order to actually read incoming PGP e-mails you’d either have to

  • tell external senders to use inline PGP (instead of PGP/MIME) so that you can use the Mailvelopebrowser addon as a hacky work-around or
  • export the e-mail as an .eml file and open that in an e-mail client like Thunderbird.
    Neither of these options is very user-friendly for Tuta users, and I doubt that the average non-technical person would even know how to do that.”

Could this get added to privacyguides?

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26

Well, the third parties are recommended already, so I don’t think it matters. It is non straight forward, but honestly not that hard either.
It’s a pity though that it doesn’t appear to support thunderbird encrypted mail, but it does work with protonmail, which is nice.

27

I compared the paid versions.

28

I think you can Tuta here. You can double tap to zoom and scroll through like a webpage.

29

On which device ? On Android I can’t double tap to zoom, no.

30

I am on android, I can. you need to open an email and double tap on the email content. It’s been there for more than 2 years.

31

Tuta doesn’t let you delete your paypal information from your account , and after contacting support saying i wanted to switch to crypto , their answer was the only way to delete paypal information is to the delete the whole account lol

Accordinng to reddit , proton lets you delete payment information or at least does so after you contact support

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32

Read again my OP. I speak about the calendar

33

I have both Proton Unlimited and Tuta Revolutionary, and I strongly prefer Tuta. Here’s why:

  • Tuta seems more privacy-oriented than Proton. All of Tuta apps are available on GitHub straight away (looking at you, Proton Calendar), all their apps are on F-Droid as well. Tuta Calendar already has an Fdroid ready release, should hit the repo soon. Protonmail won’t hit F-droid anytime soon.
  • Their notification system is awesome and works flawlessly on Graphene without Gapps. It is really battery efficient as well.
  • Recently they released a notification preview of the email content.
  • Tuta encrypts subject lines.
  • Tuta cares about Linux, they are multiplatform and they do truly mean it. Proton neglects Linux, as they don’t care about Linux users despite being in the privacy industry. Proton always follow the money first. Which isn’t bad from the business perspective, but from the user perspective it’s pretty horrible, especially if you follow PG recommendations and use Linux.
  • You can synchronize your contacts via Tuta.
  • Tuta domains aren’t blocked by third parties and their deliverability is good (emails go to the inbox). With Proton, I was forced to use a custom domain.

Tuta cons in relation to Protonmail:

  • UX/UI is not great
  • Lack of labels
  • Lack of PGP
  • Lack of Bridge (although Proton is discouraging lately from using it, as discussed in another thread)

Neutral stuff about both of them:

  • Both doesn’t deliver their promises (Proton - libre notifications, promised years ago, nothing happened. Tuta - labels and email export, however both are in progress as I can see on their GitHub so it might change soon)
  • Jurisdiction - Switzerland (Proton) vs Germany (Tuta) doesn’t matter this much at all.
  • Proton works with authorities. Everyone works with authorities if you’re a legally operating company and receive a valid request. Proton I feel like is more abused than Tuta, therefore it goes viral for cooperating with authorities more often.

Don’t get me wrong, Proton is a great value especially if you’re using their VPN and SimpleLogin, but purely as of email service Tuta wins it for me.

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35

From the little experience I have, I have to agree that Tuta seems more private. Particularly because subject lines are encrypted (that’s a big one considering how much sensitive information they can contain), that the calendar and contacts are encrypted, along with notifications, and I have extrapolated from what overuse shared (about PayPal) that Tuta has zero-knowledge of payment details, or at least Proton saves payment details together with account details and can access/share them.

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36
Off-topic

Just see how ugly ProtonVPN is on Linux.

I’m so glad that I purchased IVPN instead, which looks fine on Linux.

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37

Also eats around 500 MB of memory.

38

i can’t edit my previous reply but Tuta support finally deleted my paypal information

and from my experience i don’t have much to say that wasn’t said already , proton has better ui , but they don’t have notifications that work for degoogled users , unless you use a third party app which you would need to trust , and although Tuta’s email encryption is better than pgp that proton (and all other encrypted email providers use) , it’s not even remotely close to being adopted as the pgp standard , in my experience of many years in the privacy world , the amount of tuta email addresses that i have seen even in the privacy world is less than 10 , i wish Tuta worked on their users adoption , for example have a competitor to simplelogin

edit : Tuta allows full text search on both web app and mobile clients , proton only supports web app search for now

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40

Send them a PM message thru X and they will help you with that!

41

What exactly do you mean this? That they encrypt subject lines only between Tuta accounts, or also when you send and receive mail from non-Tuta email providers?

Also, very curious about this. When you say Proton, do you mean Proton’s actual domains (protonmail.com / ch / pm.me, etc..) or are you referring to Proton Pass and Simple Login’s aliases?

Agree with a lot of this. I don’t just want labels, but also star. The ability to star emails is an important feature.

Why is Proton discouraging using from using Bridge?

I use both, but ever since they released their desktop app, I use that mostly.
That said, I think it’s important that if someone has multiple email providers, that they be able to manage all of their emails from a single client. Hence why Proton should continue and improve email client support, not just on desktop but also for mobile.

The Problem with Proton Bridge

My issue with Bridge is related to my issue with Proton’s UI, and it’s that Proton doesn’t have a good system to manage multiple emails. I wish they had copied Skiff Mail’s system, so that when you create more addresses, they automatically have their own inbox and filter.

On Proton, you have to manually create your additional inboxes by creating filters and folders. Moreover, if you also use a Mail client, you won’t instantly know when you receive new emails to your secondary addresses, because you have to look in the folder. Plus you can’t reply with your secondary addresses from Bridge either. Not unless you choose to split your addresses.

Split Address Mode vs Combine Address Mode: Both Have Problems

I tried splitting address mode, so that all my Proton addresses have their own inbox in Thunderbird, but the problem with that is that all your folders get duplicated in each inbox. So if you have a folder that is just for Proton Address 1, it will appear for all your Proton addresses on Thunderbird.

So both split mode and combined mode have issues. Proton needs to fix that. They need to make is so that by default, each Proton address has its own inbox filter. Just like Skiff did.

Personally, I think that Proton should create their own mail client that supports not only Proton, but all other email providers. That’s probably too much to ask, though, and shouldn’t be a priority.

Tuta > Proton for Anonymous Payments

The fact that Tuta indirectly allows anonymous payments via gift cards is a big deal to me. It’s why I’m considering trying it. Proton has no excuse. They don’t have to accept Monero.
But they can sell gift cards on the Proxy Store, which accepts Monero, but also straight up cash! Simple Login in already on the Proxy Store, so there’s literally no excuse!

I personally think that all the privacy services should have anonymous payments via gift cards as an option. If Standard Notes, Notesnook, etc…were on the Proxy Store, it would be amazing!

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42

I think Tuta’s free plan allows users to only search emails dated less than four weeks old.

Proton goes into detail about their web-app search function here. Is it entirely safe to download an index of messages to our browsers (don’t know where Tuta stores theirs)? Would it be best practise to only do this in an ephemeral browser, such as Mullvad or Tor? Might be slow going because the index would need to be downloaded each time after the browser is closed.

43

yes but OP is comparing paid plans

44

Correct, although that is not noted in the title of the thread. Just a helpful pointer for anyone who came here looking to compare the two providers, but only their free plans.

45

Proton allows bitcoin payments and although it’s not as private as monero but you can use a swap service and it will cost the same unlike tuta’s gift cards that cost 8.5% more

46

Bitcoin is not anonymous, though. When you buy a gift card, all the money doesn’t go to Tuta. The 8.3% is for the Proxy Store. I personally don’t mind paying it if it means my account is anonymous.

Proton could still offer anonymous gifts cards and have no excuse not to. It would only be one options among various others.

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