Our team keeps growing
We are very happy to announce that beginning of May Paul and Kinan joined our team. Highly motivated, Paul has joined our development team and Kinan has joined our support team.
In 2020, we were able to substantially grow our team for the first time due to a quickly growing number of Tutanota users. In 2021 the growth of our team slowed down due to the Corona pandemic, which made onboarding of new people rather complicated.
Now we plan to pick up where we left of in 2020 and accelerate our growth again!
Introducing Paul
I joined Tutanota because I want to contribute to software I use and believe in, and that includes the very tool I use to communicate with people: Tutanota.
There were many other options especially in America, but in America, it is common for many software companies to restrict the freedoms of those who work for them, such as by claiming ownership over their personal work and/or restricting them from working on completely unrelated open source projects. I like to say this is like being at a chef at a restaurant, but you have to pay the restaurant to make a sandwich at home.
And since I have arrived here in Hanover, I must say that it was the right decision. The team has been wonderful! They have been very welcoming and helpful as I’ve gotten settled here. The work is very enjoyable, too.
Of course, I also enjoy having ice cream. My favorite is vanilla and chocolate - I highly recommend it!
Now I am working at Tutanota because I want an Internet that doesn’t have all of the baggage the current Internet has. Right now it’s very bloated, especially as companies have been finding new ways to monetize web pages. As a result, websites perform slowly, everything is tracked, and only big companies like Google are able to work quickly enough to make a web browser that supports everything, making it nearly impossible to create a competing web browser. This is why a large percentage of web browsers used today - even old web browsers like Opera - became a Chromium derivative (also called a “Chrome Clone”).
Privacy is the most important line of defense for personal freedom, thus we should respect the privacy of everyone.
The initial World Wide Web was a simple tool for communicating information, but it has evolved into much more, necessitating encryption. Unfortunately, while the World Wide Web and encryption have evolved, governments have been pressuring tech companies into implementing backdoors to perform surveillance.
After all, time machines don’t exist, so one can’t go back in time to witness a personal, private conversation someone made in person, but a backdoor would essentially provide such a time machine for anyone with access to the backdoor to witness a conversation made over the Internet if the conversation was stored insecurely. It does not matter if the initial intentions behind backdoors were truly noble (i.e. finding the bad guys), allowing anyone access to snooping our data is a slippery slope to even bigger and even more egregious violations of our human rights.
I think one key thing people should understand is that when a single person’s privacy is breached, everyone’s privacy is breached. For example, when governments ask for a backdoor to access one person’s personal information, said backdoor can be used to access anyone’s personal information.
This is why end-to-end encryption should become the standard for communication, and this is why privacy on the Internet is important.
Introducing Kinan
It is not a coincidence that I started working at Tutanota. I chose to apply for the job because I believe in what the team here is doing. Email encryption has been possible for a long time but Tutanota brings it to a new level. Now it is easily available for everyone.
On top of that, I really enjoy my work. Tech Support can be immediately rewarding. And knowing that I help people in using and choosing a private and secure email provider only adds to this reward.
As a physics student I am trained to solve problems on a daily basis. Often times those problems make no sense at first glance but start to get more interesting the more you look into them. I love it when this happens in support. When the case requires me to dig deep into some server issue or code bug, this is when I barely feel time passing.
The internet wasn’t built with its current scope and use cases in mind. It was built by scientists and enthusiasts to share and connect. But it developed very rapidly in ways not imagined before. As an enthusiast myself I love being surprised by the new technologies made possible by the internet but sadly I am also constantly surprised by the amount of invasive tracking and the lack of privacy online.
The technically-inclined can fight all of this uphill battle against trackers. But this shouldn’t be a fight. Uphill or otherwise. Privacy and security should be the default for the techie and the layperson alike. Somewhere among all of the possible profit and surveillance possibilities online, we forgot that privacy is a basic right.
Tutanota development
Since we launched Tutanota in 2014, our growing team has added lots of functionalities to Tutanota, and even built desktop clients. Now, our new team members will help us to continue the list of features requested by the community, our users! Your support enables us to grow our team continuously.
- In 2014 we published the fully encrypted Tutanota email client, iOS and Android apps.
- In 2015 we introduced first paid features such as custom domain support.
- In 2017 we published a completely new version of Tutanota with better speed & design.
- In 2018 we published the Tutanota desktop clients for Linux, Mac OS and Windows in beta.
- In 2019 we published the beta version of the encrypted calendar and started compressing emails to give you more storage space.
- In 2021 we pushed the Tutanota desktop clients out of beta after an extensive security review.
- In 2021 we completed a first prototype for updating our encryption to post-quantum secure algorithms.
- In 2022 we published a first beta for offline mode. We are now continuing to work on offline mode to push it out of beta and bring the functionality also to the mobile apps!
For a detailed list of all the features that we have implemented, please check our feature list.
For an up to date information on what we are currently working, please take a look at the first features listed on our roadmap.
We thank our entire community for having made this success possible.
Together we will build a better web - one where privacy is respected by default.