this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2021
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Privacy
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No, the Tutanota court order said that they had to comply with the law if information is needed for a specific use, and they can only give what they have, meaning that if you communicate with other e-mail providers such as Protonmail (who encrypt e-mails by default) they can only give the court encrypt data, which is not so useful, but for example if you get an e-mail from Gmail then they can give them that information since it's unencrypted.
i was referring to the recent order (late last year) from a german court ruling tutanota had to "spy" on one user. tutanota cannot access the emails in that user's mailbox because they are already encrypted but they had to comply with the court order so their solution was to write a function that prevents that specific user's new emails from being encrypted.
Yes, I know you were referring to that case.
This is from the exact article in German you cited at the end:
[Update, Nov. 30, 12 p.m.] As Tutanota emphasized, the monitoring measure only affects newly incoming unencrypted emails. The company cannot decrypt data that is already encrypted, as well as end-to-end encrypted emails in Tutanota. [Update.]
Besides Tutanota, some other providers also store all incoming mail in encrypted form. At Protonmail it is also standard, Posteo and Mailbox.org offer encryption as an option. Tutanota provides an overview of the number of requests from authorities in its transparency report.
you write as if you're correcting me (first comment began with "no", second citing what i already stated) but i said nothing in contradiction - already encrypted emails won't be unencrypted. i did not state otherwise.
It doesn't say that, it says:
This means only e-mails received after the the monitoring declared by the court was approved which are not encrypted will be sent to them. This is reinforced by the following sentence:
Meaning they can't do anything with old, encrypted e-mails.
Meaning new encrypted e-mails.
i understood but i now see i wasn't clear enough in my original comment. sometimes i omit things for sake of clarity but it seems i omitted too much in this case. it was not my intention to imply that all incoming emails, regardless of encryption status, would be unencrypted.
No problem, it's just I had this exact same discussion in a Privacy Tools issue and I was sure I knew what I was talking about, also I don't to say X service has been compromised.