Tutanota is no longer using the term Blacklist.

The Tutanota email client has never used any racially insensitive terms such as blacklist. However, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, we have now revised our FAQ and How-to to replace some phrases with neutral descriptions.

Spam and no spam

In Tutanota spam rules are handled in such a way that users can define senders, domains, even top level domains as ‘Spam’ or ‘No spam’. These racially neutral terms are unproblematic and we will keep them.

However, we do use the term blacklist and whitelist in the FAQ and How-to, mainly so that people searching for these terms will be able to find the corresponding FAQ and How-to entries, which explain how to set up spam rules in Tutanota.

This is problematic because terms such as ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ reinforce the notion that black is bad and white is good.

Replacements in FAQ & How-to

We have now replaced these terms in all headlines and texts. We will only leave the word ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ as a tag so that people who continue to search for these terms will be able to find the correcponding entries. As these terms are fixed phrases in many languages, it would make things too complex for many users if we removed them entirely.

However, as we have removed these terms from the headlines and the main texts, and never used them in the Tutanota mail client, we hope to be able to fully eliminate them soon.