Huge community support enabled us to employ our 14th team member: Welcome Jonas!

Fight for privacy

Tutanota has seen multiple DDoS attacks this summer, one of which even attacked our DNS provider. Resulting from this, we had to put a lot of time and effort into fending off these attacks as well as hardening our infrastructure against such attacks.

During this time, our community endured multiple downtimes - mostly rather short, but one of them lasting for multiple hours. However, instead of turning their back on Tutanota, most users understand that privacy matters and must be fought for. So they supported us even more: During last three months (August, September and October of 2020), we have seen more upgrades to the Tutanota paid plans than any three-month period prior to the attacks. On top of that, we have received an extensive amount of donations, some users donating more than 100 Euro, just to enable us to fight off the attacks.

Thanks to the community

We are deeply thankful for this amazing support. As always at Tutanota, we invest all income into new personnel. So this time, we can thank all our supporters during the last three months: You have enabled us to employ our 14th team member: Jonas.

He is not an expert in fending off DDoS attacks - we have already covered this ourselves as you might have noticed - but he is a very qualified software engineer who has started working on improving Tutanota right away.

Gift cards are coming

As we are already getting close to Christmas, Jonas has started working on gift cards together with John (who joined in August). By giving away gift cards for Tutanota this Christmas, you will enable friends and family to protect their private communication as well! On top of that, you will keep supporting Tutanota. With your help Tutanota will become the privacy-friendly alternative to Gmail and Co, focusing on one thing and one thing alone: protecting your right to privacy online.

Speeding up development

While we were busy these last couple of months to harden our infrastructure against DDoS attacks as well as onboarding five new developers, we are now gearing up for a speedy development of features: Offline support, email import, out of office-notifications, conversation view. A lot of new features are already being worked on, so get excited for an eventful 2021!

Introducing Jonas

”I wanted to start at Tutanota because I would like to work on a project where encryption technologies are made easy and applicable for everyone. And I think that trust in software - especially when it comes to a sensitive area like personal communication - can only be established with open source software."

"In the future, I hope that more and more online services will not keep unencrypted data on their servers, but that everything can only be read by the users themselves and the people they explicitly allow to read it. In my opinion this principle should work on social media platforms as well."

"This approach is important to me on the net, because we can assume that on a large scale unencrypted communication is read along. And the analysis systems are also capable of processing these large amounts of data. It is not clear who exactly has access to it today or will have access in the future.”

Continuing growth

At Tutanota, we plan to continue to grow next year and beyond. If you are happy with the security and privacy, you get with Tutanota, please upgrade to Premium now! Of course, you can also donate.

As a community-driven project we depend on our users. When we started building Tutanota, we deliberately decided against taking investors’ money, particularly from American investors, to make sure that our development remains independent. We don’t want anyone to be able to influence our development decision so that we can focus on what is important to us: building the most secure online service without any compromises.

We are excited to see this business model thrive, and you are the main reason for our success. We thank each and everyone of you for your support!

And if you are a skilled software engineer who loves privacy and open source, please apply now.