We are very happy to welcome Valentin, John, Tim and Patrik!

Growing team

At Tutanota we are constantly growing our team along with increasing sign-ups for paid accounts to speed up development.

Now, we are happy that four highly talented and motivated young software engineers have joined our team. While John and Valentin have started right away at implementing new features, Tim and Patrik have joined Tutanota via a dual study program of the FHDW Hanover - the university where also our founders Arne and Matthias have studied.

Passion for privacy

At Tutanota, we do not only build free encrypted email to secure everbody’s communication. Tutanota is an open source project to bring the power back to people. Instead of sharing all your data with big tech companies, Tutanota allows you to own your data due to the built-in encryption. All new members share our passion for privacy and freedom rights.

Valentin

For over ten years I have been committed to human rights and have organized human rights monitoring in Mexico and Guatemala with CAREA e.V.. Most of the time, we accompany communities there who are fighting for their land rights and against displacement through large-scale projects (e.g. mining, highway construction, tourism). In Guatemala, however, these are also organizations of survivors who sought to bring high-ranking military personnel to justice for the genocide of the Mayan population. Unfortunately, the fight for these rights is too often paid for with lives.

Working with these threatened human rights defenders has made me realize what terrible consequences surveillance can have and how important communication security is for a free, democratic society. Since then, I have also become enthusiastic about the technical-mathematical side of these tools and I work with great enthusiasm to find technical solutions for secure communication. I am now looking forward to work on Tutanota and to make the product so good that everyone can communicate securely without technical knowledge.

John

I can say now that I think privacy is important to me because it’s so intrinsically linked with freedom, especially on the internet. I think we’ve already found ourselves in an online surveillance state, but not enough people seem to either realize, care or believe they have any alternatives to the likes of Google and Facebook.

My perfect vision of the internet would be a decentralized, community run network, where access isn’t controlled by governments or ISPs and the information isn’t controlled by corporations. Think of projects like IPFS or the various community wireless networks around the world; there’s even one in my home city, Melbourne!

Companies like Tutanota are taking a stand and doing what they can to provide not only a more secure, but a more free internet, and I think they genuinely stand a chance to take away some of the control of giants like Google and put it back in the hands of the people.

Patrik

Privacy is important to me because nowadays it is no longer a matter of course. Today, even for newsletters, you have to give your email address and other data to be able to read a single article. Information and data is being collected everywhere; I think this has to stop.

Tim

Privacy online is hard to get. Nevertheless, it is so important. I do not want everyone to know what I am doing on the net. Also, I don’t think it is okay that companies can sell my data without me knowing about it.

Speeding up development

Patrik, Tim, John and Valentin are all committed to speed up client improvements so that widely requested features will be released faster. While Patrik and Tim have started to learn the basics about programming, John and Valentin have dived right into it and already fixed bugs, added improvements and features to Tutanota.

Their next tasks include improvement of displaying external images from trusted senders, offline support as well as pin/fingerprint unlock for the Tutanota Android and iOS apps.

Community-supported growth

At Tutanota we follow a very basic principle: When the income generated from selling Tutanota increases, we add more developers to the team to speed up development. So far, you have helped us grow our team to 13 passionate freedom fighters. We thank you very much for this.

If you are still using the Free version of Tutanota, we invite you to upgrade now!

This year alone, we have added lots of important features to Tutanota:

• Phishing prevention
• Calendar invites
• DDoS-Mitigation
• Support process improvements to free developer time
• Post-Quantum prototype

And we are not done yet! Thank you all for your continuous support. We are looking forward to the upcoming features as much as you do.