Tutao turns 10!

Celebrate with us ten years of Tutao, the company behind Tutanota.

Ten years ago we have started our journey to create the most secure email service. In ten years we have grown our company from three to fifteen employees and - more importantly - from zero to millions of users around the world. Seeing so many people switch to our encrypted email is simply amazing - not just for us, but also for security on the web in general! This gives us reason to celebrate because only with strong end-to-end encryption we can protect our right to privacy!


Tutanota team

The beginning of Tutanota

In the early days of Tutao, we built Tutanota with three developers only, two of which being the founders Arne and Matthias. Sometimes we disagreed immensely during development planning - as you can see here - but most of the times, we could quickly decide on how to improve Tutanota. 🙂

Early days.

Our goal from the start was to build the most secure email service so with each feature we implemented we always focussed on security and privacy first. This enabled us to develop an innovative search tool that lets users search their emails locally, without our servers being able to see any of the users’ encrypted emails.

As part of this focus on privacy, we also worked hard to remove any Google connections from Tutanota, even from our Android app. Finally, we were able to publish a completely Google-free Android app with its own push notification service. This also enabled us to publish the app on F-Droid.

Privacy activists

As the makers of Tutanota we see ourselves not as typical entrepreneurs, but more as privacy 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.

In the last three years, our team has grown so quickly that we had to move to new and bigger offices. It is great fun to work with such an amazing and dedicated team on something that you really care for.

Tutanota team in new offices.

Our dream of the internet

Our dream of the future internet is that everything is encrypted by default. That’s why your encrypted Tutanota mailbox already comes with a fully encrypted address book and calendar. In the future we plan to add an encrypted drive, encrypted notes and much more.

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 and decryption process - at least until they switch as well.

Privacy era

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 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 our milestones of the last ten years here:

Development achievements since 2011.