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Written post.
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Tuta’s post on the same:
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It’s still very early days, but I hope Tuta can come up with a great product. I remember them saying in the past that they had no intention of launching a whole suite, criticizing Proton for going that direction. I am curious what their long term strategy is.
Because although they are the 2nd most popular E2EE email service, other email privacy companies are popping up. And once one of them starts becoming popular, other companies are likely going to follow Proton’s direction by developing a suite. Right now Tuta is ahead of those companies, and it’s important that they capitalize on their lead to do whatever they think is best. I just hope it works and that they are successful.
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I really hope Tuta succeeds and doesn’t end up like Proton, just churning out more and more services. It’s annoying.
Email, a calendar and a drive are more than enough; I’m waiting for the official release of their drive to switch over to them completely.
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I would wait until they make it a stable product. I wonder if we will have a native app for Linux.
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I’m betting the opposite. They won’t keep expanding into a suite but only keep and improve their existing products a lot more. Tuta is akin to Mullvad. Select few products so the focus is only on making it the best first.
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How do you mean ahead? And which companies? Just Proton?
There’s lots of E2EE clouds now. What they need to be competitive:
- sync clients for desktop, including Linux
- mobile apps (including photo upload etc.)
- API that can be used by apps like Foldersync (Mega and Filen have it, for example)
- ideally some way to edit files in a web browser like the mainstream clouds can do - Cryptpad shows that it’s possible (they have OnlyOffice + E2EE in the browser)
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Tuta had actually stated that they didn’t want to end up like Proton by developing a whole suite of software, but rather wanted to focus on the essentials.
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Don’t think this will ever happen. Their cryptography is custom like their email and that’s why it’s not compatible with PGP. And plug ins are a horrible way to go about it.
This will take a long long time. They took more than 5 years just to deliver on conversation mode in their inbox. That time delay really made me give up on them. They are only good at very select things and that’s it. One should not expect it to have all the bells and whistles of a fully fledged mature product even when out of stable and fully made. Their products are MVP but stable and functional with excellent privacy and security. And that’s it.
What I think I know for sure is again like their other products, Drive will be for the most sensitive info and not really made to be used as an everyday file storage and management tool. It’s for storage primarily, not file and folder management everyday.
You misunderstood my quote. I was saying that other E2EE email companies are likely to follow Proton by creating a suite if they succeed with email. I wasn’t saying that Tuta will go that direction. But that if their competitors who are currently far behind become successful and follow Proton’s footsteps, I hope Tuta has a good strategy. I don’t want Tuta to lose their current lead for lack of vision or innovation. I want them to be competitive, whatever strategy they choose.
I mean that when it comes to E2EE email providers, Proton and Tuta are by far in the lead, with Proton being considerably ahead of Tuta. The other E2EE email providers are not even close to being as popular or trusted by the privacy community at large. But I’m sure that’s not going to be the case forever.
I’m sure a third and fourth player are gonna come along and be very competitive. This is pure speculation, but IMHO, Skiff was on its way to becoming the third big player in the E2EE email space, but they fumbled the bag.
They’d argue they won in capitalism.
As far as the founders are concerned, they won a bunch of money, and I am guessing stable employment for a couple of years if they decided to stay. But as far as Skiff the product is concerned, it remains to be seen what Notion does with it, and if they can spin it into a new successful product.
Skiff is dead. It ain’t coming back. Notion needed the talent behind Skiff. Not Skiff. I think that should be clear now. Why else would Notion wanted it shut down when it was growing.
I see. But I assumed that was because they are planning to launch a similar service integrated into Notion. Is that not the case?
This could happen. If it did, Proton having another competitor at their level could still be good overall. the other smaller email providers will also still exist.
Nonetheless, I think drive pairs well with email because the emails already take up storage. You can upload a file by sending it as an attachment. Therefore a formal drive let’s you upload more directly with larger files, manage them more easily, and hopefully the extra storage can be used to store more emails too. Those of us with decades of emails can easily have 10GB or more.
Drive therefore is very closely related to email service, in my view. You can have drive without email, but every email provider involves some type of cloud storage.
What really keeps me on Proton free is their email search, which seems to be as good as unencrypted searches. From what I’ve read, the others have issues, even if the provider is working on it. Someone tell me if another provider has now gotten them working well . I’d like to support a smaller provider like posteo or mailbox.org, but it sounds like they have problems in terms of functionality.
Emails are almost completely disjoint from one another, whereas filesystem storage (“Drive”) is often structured. You could reasonably store emails in an object storage database like S3, whereas you require hurdles to usefully represent files and folders in such a format. This given, I really don’t think email suits itself to drive storage companion very much more than any other cloud-hosted data.
Just about every single computer-based application requires some kind of account and associated storage of data. Email doesn’t feel very special in that regard.
More topically, I recall an interview with a Tuta representative on The Hated One’s YouTube channel where they stated that they weren’t interested in introducing drive storage, because they understood the importance of not having your eggs in a single basket—and just focusing on email.
Well, lo’ and behold, they are introducing drive storage. I don’t see their new commitment to “only the essentials” as any more credible than their commitment to “just email” was.
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The only service Tuta would be missing after the drive is something like SimpleLogin or Addy integrated directly into Tuta Mail; no VPN, Wallet, office suite or even an AI like Lumo, and it would be perfect.
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I mean yes, you could say this about other cloud solutions. I don’t think it’s more related with email, just that if you’re providing email then it’s closely related. The most pertinent difference with email is that we can be talking about tens of gigabytes of files due to attachments, whereas it’s hard to get anywhere near that with spreadsheets, contacts, or what have you.
As for trust, I save that for individuals I have a history with, not for-profit companies made up of various people.
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