
Tutanota: GPLv3-licensed, end-to-end encrypted email - jokoha
https://tutanota.de
======
mike-cardwell
Loads external images. By Default. With no option to turn off.

Not a viable webmail client for anyone who expects privacy.

[edit] The email that it sends to external addresses does not have a
text/plain part, only html

[edit] Stores your email address in session storage and then pre-fills next
time you log in. Does not let you opt in or out and doesn't warn you that this
will happen. Unsuitable for a "public" machine.

[edit] Nice, they support DANE. When I email a Tutanota user, or a Tutanota
user emails me (@grepular.com), SMTP is _forced_ to use SSL or fail, and the
certificate is _forced_ to verify with the fingerprint published in our DNSSEC
secured DNS zones. No SMTP MITM's here.

~~~
darklajid
I'd say these things are fixable so far [1].

\- Image loading: I'd assume that this is possible to implement, given the
current implementation?

\- text/plain & multipart mails: I'd expect the same, really. Doesn't sound
too bad to build it.

\- same for session storage

I agree with all your points, but these are things that are conceptually quite
viable, imo. I'd expect these to be valid issues on Github [1] and reasonably
easy fixes, no?

1: [https://github.com/tutao/tutanota](https://github.com/tutao/tutanota)

~~~
mike-cardwell
Yeah, they can be fixed. FWIW, I used their feedback form to mention the
automatic image loading privacy leak.

~~~
MatthiasPfau
I am one of the founders. Thanks for your feedback. We will fix this early
next year!

~~~
mike-cardwell
FWIW, I discovered the image loading problem by using
[https://emailprivacytester.com/](https://emailprivacytester.com/) with a test
account. Might be worth testing any such changes that you make there. (I am
the author of that website).

------
aswerty
I'd be wary about potential lock-in. The service seems to rely on everyone
using their product. I'd like to see an end goal where they can communicate
with other clients that support PGP or S/MIME.

I do like how their approach avoids ever having an email sent from Tutanota in
plain text other than when either the sender or receiver views it. Of course
the main issue is the receiver has to jump through hoops if they don't use
Tutanota. I imagine most people will not enjoy the hoop jumping.

~~~
jokoha
In their FAQ they say: "We are planning on making Tutanota interoperable with
pgp"

~~~
aswerty
Ah yes, I missed that (the FAQ is quite long). It'll be interesting to see how
that works out.

------
onli
The statements about german law are wrong or at least very misleading, and
that might be important here.

Mail Providers of a specific size here are obliged to implement Lawful
Interception interfaces. It is quite obvious that in the current climate,
there is no guarantee at all that those won't be used by the german
intelligence and then transported to the NSA.

Note also that their source-link in that paragraph is not working.

However, the situation might actually work. If they have a true zero knowledge
system, it could indeed be very hard in Germany to force them to produce
additional data, and what they can't have they can't deliver. That is however
not as clear-cut as they make it look like.

That is comparable to the Vorratsdatenspeicherung, ISPs saving the traffic
metadata. While the effort to force them to do that failed, all ISPs still
save those data - meaning that Germany is not the described data heaven.

~~~
higherpurpose
I doubt any system designed in such a way that the provider simply _can 't_
access the information, could be forced by authorities to provide some kind of
backdoor into it, if it's a somewhat lawful country, and not one such as North
Korea or whatever. Whether companies can be _intimidated_ into doing it is a
whole other story, but legally, I doubt any democratic government should be
able to force them to do that.

~~~
ianopolous
Here's an example of that for PrivateSky: [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gchq-
forced-privatesky-secure-email...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gchq-forced-
privatesky-secure-email-service-offline-529392)

~~~
aswerty
PrivateSky looks like it had the same failing as LavaBit in that the service
provider actually had access to the decryption key for your email. So
encryption in these services was vulnerable to a court order imposed on the
service provider to use or share the key.

I'm not saying Tutanota don't have an issue like this but their main selling
point appears to be that this isn't the case.

------
bainsfather
I've just signed up for this. It looks like exactly what we want from 'secure'
email:

(0) you can send unencrypted email just like any other webmail service.

PLUS

(1) end-to-end encrypted if sender&receiver use tutanova.

(2) if receiver does not use tutanova, you can still send them encrypted email
if you want to: they get an email saying - 'you have an encrypted mail, click
this link to view it' \- on clicking the link, they decrypt the mail by
entering a pre-agreed password.

(3) it is free. they seem to be making money from the 'enhanced features' in
their 'Outlook Addin' package.

~~~
e12e
I don't know, it's missing (4) "Host your own (encrypted or not) email" ?

------
feld
Even GMail could launch end-to-end encrypted email if they wanted to do so for
all GMail users. They own the entire infrastructure end-to-end; that's not the
hard part.

The hard part is encrypting email for _anyone_ \-- even if they don't use your
service.

~~~
phaer
Well the hardest part is to persuade most users that end to end encryption is
something they actually want.

If GMail would launch an integration with PGP (or similar), call it "Secure
GMail - now extra private" or something and start to refer to unencrypted Mail
as "unsafe", "untrusted" or something like this much would have been won.

~~~
hobarrera
The problem with GMail launching browser-encrypted email is that you have two
groups of people:

(a) People that don't care about encryption. Unlikely to get any signifacant
amount of adoption. (b) People who do. This group of people know that browser-
based encryption can't be done in a trusted manner, hence, won't want to use
such a product.

~~~
tokenizerrr
Luckily Google's thought of that. They're working on an extension:
[https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/](https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/)

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jmnicolas
I'm waiting for someone respected in the crypto circles reviewing their crypto
soundness before even considering using this.

Being GPL is a good point but it doesn't mean they don't have a fatal flaw in
their code.

I wish I had the skills to review the crypto I use.

~~~
tptacek
It's hosted web mail that does crypto in Javascript. How closely do you expect
crypto engineers to look at it?

Don't use web mail for secure messaging.

------
tptacek
Don't use web mail for secure messaging.

~~~
bainsfather
I'd like to send email messages to people without them being routinely read,
stored and indexed by my govt, other govts, the hosting company, etc. Naively,
this sounds simple enough to do, and you'd imagine that everyone would
want&use such a system.

How to I persuade other non-technical people to use something that is
moderately secure? Tutanota seems like something I might be able to persuade
people to use - 'hey, sign up for this, it is free, it is just like your
current webmail _plus_ if we both use it, our mail is encrypted.' That is an
improvement on what they currently use, no?

Do you know of any 'good' (or just 'good enough' (or even just 'better'))
options?

------
hobarrera
Wow! This is new "encrypted email" service is just like good old encrypted
email (eg: GPG), but with user lock-in!

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upofadown
When reading these things you can save a lot of time by just skimming the
front page to see what standard protocols they implement. In the case of this
thing time was saved...

------
legulere
I don't know what people think when they put their code under GPL (especially
v3) when they want to make a better version of an already open standard.

One reason why tcp ip was so successful was that everybody could copy the
implementation from BSD into their product.

~~~
icebraining
Probably because they want people to use their own systems and apps.

