I’ve been seeing comments about mailing lists. They usually want plaint text emails like these.
Tuta
Notice: Use of IMAP and SMTP, open standards for email clients, is not possible with Tuta. This is not acceptable behavior for an email provider and use of Tuta is strongly recommended against for this reason. Tuta’s stated reasons for not supporting these protocols are lies and you would be well served by closing your account there.
Well that’s a strong opinion. And yes, 100%, IMAP is not a end to end encrypted protocol so how can they offer it when the server can’t read the data?
They will have access to metadata - otherwise they wouldn’t be able to work as email service. That’s sufficient to implement those protocols.
The client then would have to bring their own crypto, and you’d probably want the SMTP server to reject mails if delivered unencrypted (though their FAQ says you can send unencrypted mails).
The reason they claim they can’t is probably trying to keep full control over what users are doing, in which case I agree - fuck them, don’t use services like that.
Receiving email, the service provider has full access to the metadata agreed. The main difference between proton and tuta is what data is kept encrypted at rest.
Proton does not encrypt the metadata, from, too, subject
Tuta does encrypt all of that metadata at rest
The clients are open source, you can do anything you want, you just have to implement it. I don’t know where the hate is coming from. Tuta is unique being the only email provider that encrypts all the data at rest, and I want to give them a lot of love for that, I don’t understand the hate at all
I don’t know where the hate is coming from.
Kneejerking.
At the time of sending the mail I need the metadata - so offering a SMTP server implementation which keeps this in memory while forwarding is not hard. You’d lose a persistent spool in case of delivery errors - but we’ve been doing relays that keep the client connection open while trying to deliver the mail to relay errors directly to the client already 30 years ago, so that also isn’t an excuse.
For IMAP - if you don’t do serverside searching or similar it’ll work with fully encrypted mails.