Birthday celebration: Here is to 8 years of Tutanota!

Tutanota is the go-to app for secure emails: With built-in encryption all data is protected, and no one but the intended recipient can read your emails - even we, the Tutanota developers, have no access. Started in 2011, Tutanota now is an email client with an encrypted address book and calendar. Matthias Pfau explains why secure communications are so important in times of all-round surveillance.

In theory everybody knows that an email is like a postcard: Everybody can read it. Yet, most people type very sensitive information - like banking details, social security numbers, medical issues - into their emails. For some reason, possibly because it is being delivered electronically and not by the hands of a postman, they believe no one will read the information.

Unfortunately, they are wrong. As developers we understand how all information that is available online is being gathered, scanned, and read - either by malicious attackers who want to steal your identity or access your online accounts, or by Secret Services, and we are not only speaking about the NSA here.

Keeping the spies out

We have a vision of the Internet in which the spies have no access at all. This will happen once services and apps secure their users’ data with encryption. This is why we need Tutanota: We are building the easiest encrypted mailbox and calendar that everybody can use.

Only by enabling people to use a secure way of communicating, they can start to protect their sensitive information. With Tutanota they don’t even have to think about whether they want to protect their emails or not, everything is encrypted by default. If they want to send end-to-end encrypted emails easily, we recommend that both sides use Tutanota as the encryption process then is fully automated. If the other person chooses to stay with their old provider like Gmail or Yahoo, they can exchange a password for the encryption/decryption process.

Since Tutanota is as easy to use as any other email provider, more and more people make the switch because of the security they get with it. To date, we have millions of users around the globe, with hundreds of thousands new users joining every month. Our growth is highest in the United States and in Europe. We are very excited about this because it means people start to understand the importance of privacy online and why it is necessary to protect their private communication.

Encryption is on the rise

We believe this is just the beginning and that the future Internet will be much more secure for all of us. That’s also why we plan to add encrypted cloud storage, notes and much more to Tutanota in the future.

As the makers of Tutanota we see ourselves not as typical entrepreneurs, but more as Internet activists. We want to enable people to stop illegal mass surveillance as well as surveillance capitalism and to change the Internet for the better, bit by bit. It is great fun to work with such an amazing and dedicated team on something that you really care for.

Everybody knows that building a startup is not only fun, but also hard work. It helps a lot when you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, not just for your startup and your team, but also for the society in general.

Today we are very proud of what we have achieved so far. And we are certain that this is only the beginning because the privacy era has only just started.

Happy birthday to the entire team! 🎉🎉🎉

Check here what we’ve achieved in the last eight years.