Why the Tutanota desktop clients are best for productivity and security!

Benefits of desktop clients

The Tutanota desktop clients can be downloaded from our website. Once installed, the open source clients enable you to better integrate Tutanota on your computer and speed up your workflow.

For help, please check our FAQ section on desktop clients.

Update on December 15th 2022: We are now working on an import feature for the Tutanota desktop clients.

Update on November 28th 2022: All Tutanota desktop clients as well as the Android and iOS apps now support offline mode.

Update on March 8th 2022: All Tutanota desktop clients as well as the Android and iOS apps now also support U2F, the most secure way for two-factor authentication.

List of benefits

In general the Tutanota desktop clients makes your email experience much more pleasant, particularly compared to using Tutanota in a browser.

The clients come with these benefits:

1. Push notifications for emails & calendar events
2. Open files as attachments in Tutanota
3. Use the system secret storage
4. Spell checker for multiple languages
5. Set Tutanota as default mail handler
6. Automatic signature check upon client updates for best security
7. Installation policy for business use

The desktop clients allow us to integrate deeper into the operating system so that we are able to achieve a much better user experience. We focus on improving the Tutanota desktop clients also because Tutanota does not support IMAP - and that for a good reason.

Supporting IMAP is not an option for Tutanota as it would undermine our built-in encryption. As an encrypted email service that promises to always keep your data secure, we simply can not implement a feature that destroys this promise.

Technically, supporting IMAP for us would only be possible if the emails were downloaded to your computer and stored there not encrypted. However, at Tutanota we promise that your data is always end-to-end encrypted, also on your own devices! So instead of supporting an insecure feature, we are focusing on improving our open source desktop clients.

Focus on improving desktop clients

We are continuously improving Tutanota; and in doing so we put a focus on our open source desktop clients. We already have:

• Conducted a security audit of all desktop clients
• Added a spell checker for multiple languages
• Integrated the clients deeper into the each OS
• Enabled opening files as attachments in Tutanota (MAPI support for Windows)
• Pushed the desktop clients out of beta
• Added U2F support (hardware key)
• Enabled offline mode

OS integration for Windows

One great example of the superiority of the desktop clients compared to webmail access is the deep integration that we have achieved on Windows. The seamless OS integration makes using Tutanota even easier and more convenient.

For example, you can directly attach files to a new email, even when Tutanota is not running presently, via the context menu of a file -> Send to… -> Email recipient.

In various programs you can use the “Send document as mail” function and attach the currently opened file to a new email. Examples are

• LibreOffice under File -> Send -> As e-mail
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Microsoft Office

Another big plus is that business software often uses this feature to send invoices and similar files directly from the application to the email client. For instance, you can now use the Tutanota desktop client to directly send invoices from the business tool SAGE50 via email.

Offline mode for enhanced usability

In 2022, we have enabled offline mode for all Tutanota apps, including the desktop clients. This way you can check your mailbox, calendar and contacts, even when you do not have access to the internet. On top of that, offline mode comes with many advantages:

• Loading time has reduced drastically thanks to offline caching of data for free & paying users (particularly in the mobile apps)
• Already indexed emails* are cached encrypted on your device and can be viewed even if the internet connection is not available
• Calendar entries and contacts are always cached (do not need to have been viewed)
• Logging in when offline is instantaneous (only available in paid accounts)
• Write access is also planned to improve offline mode further

*To index an email, it needs to be viewed in the app when online or search indexing needs to be activated under Settings -> Email -> Search mailbox.

Find out more on the new offline support.

Best solution: desktop clients

To sum it up, our desktop clients for Windows, Linux and macOS make using Tutanota

• More convenient,
• More secure,
• And easier to use.

The clue with Tutanota is that all data is always encrypted, even when stored locally in the desktop client. The smart search feature creates an encrypted search index to be searched locally on your client. This way, we make sure that our servers do not see any of your data or any of your search queries. Tutanota is the only email service with this combination of usability and security.

If you haven’t already, it is time to install the Tutanota desktop client now. The desktop client makes sure that your data is always secured to the maximum.

In case you do not use Tutanota, yet, sign up for your new mail account now.

Pick your favorite Tutanota email applications to use your encrypted mailbox easily on all your devices:

• Desktop client for Linux
• Desktop client for Windows
• Desktop client for macOS
• Android App
• iOS App
• Webmail Client

Welcome to your encrypted mailbox!