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12 hours agoMe +wife were seriously considering switching to proton, but we had been “considering” for like half a year. So while the transfer now has been officially put on hold indefinitely, that’s in practice no different from how it was before :)
Have considered tuta but there are several reasons I’m not sold on that service - primarily that they manage to give me (who isn’t a techie!) the impression (I might be wrong…) of a walled garden where all the benefits /convenience of the service evaporate (??) as soon as you need to talk to a non-tuta user.(??)
Of course, bolting security on top of email is going to be a challenge, and require trade-offs between convenience and security.
It’s likely that there are aspects of how Tuta works that I have misunderstood, but based on my understandings, this is my take:
For my use case, I believe tuta’s choice of increased security isn’t worth the added inconvenience for the people I’m communicating with who have to access our communications through a separate webpage instead of within their normal email inbox. (Perhaps they can export the emails from that site, but if so, they’d be unencrypted on their machine unless the user took manual steps to reenceypt, no?)
Secondly, I do not, IRL, know anybody else who uses Tuta, but I know a handful of people who do use PGP (for example through Proton). That would mean that communications with them would need to be unencrypted, or go through Tuta’s portal, just as if they were regular gmail users. In contrast, if I were to choose a PGP based encryption, communicating with them - encrypted - would be more convenient. Less secure? Yes, but as I said above, that’s a trade-off that I’m willing to make. Not to mention, if I no longer liked the service next year I ought be able to move on without ruining access to old emails, or really, even seeing an interruption in ongoing email conversations. Yes, that does require a custom domain to work in practice - I’ve set that as a precondition for whatever service I’m going to sign up for.
Thirdly, I mentioned a walled garden. Assume I were to use Tuta for a couple of years. People I regularly exchange encrypted mail with have gotten frustrated by having to use the portal and signed up for Tuta as well. One day, I decide that I would like to move elsewhere for whatever reason. Now I’m the one who have to use Tuta’s portal whenever I want to communicate with my friends, because there’s no other service that I can go to, that’s compatible with Tuta’s encryption. That’s why I consider Tuta to be a walled garden.
I am glad that they finally did add import/export. When I took the service for a spin maybe a year and a half ago, import and export wasn’t yet possible and a another reason too why I didn’t join them already in mid 2023.
(BTW, have they fixed the Linux desktop app so that it can be used on a hi-dpi (4k) screen without a magnifying glass? Back then, that app refused to listen to any display scaling commands. I had to reconfigure the display resolution from 4k to 2k to be able to interact with the app.)