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Tutanota and Interlink

Posted: 2019-12-03, 23:38
by Mæstro
I would like to begin by stating how much I like Interlink; I started using it earlier this years as a way to access my Google-based academic inbox without letting Google approach my primary browser, and I have been impressed at its abilities. (The Moonscape theme is an especially nice touch.) In fact, I prefer using a specialised e-mail client now to Web-based clients. However, my personal inbox is hosted by Tutanota, and their FAQ states that they do not support IMAP because it cannot encrypt messages.

Encryption has never been that much of a concern for me; I use Tutanota because it does not mine my papers for data to sell and because it sees very little spam, while I have never made use of their encrypted sending feature. Would there be some manual way to make my Tutanota letters available in Interlink? If not, what would a suitable alternative be that does not mine data or get heavy spam? (I do not have any IT education at all, so hosting my own is out of the question.)

Re: The Official Interlink Mail & News Discussion Thread

Posted: 2019-12-03, 23:57
by Moonchild
Off-topic:
Mail encryption works perfectly fine over IMAP. Also, connection encryption over IMAP (if that is what they mean) is pretty much standard for any modern mail server.
So, I'm not sure what tutanota is meaning to say here, but it seems to me like a strange reason to decline dedicated mail clients.

Re: Tutanota and Interlink

Posted: 2019-12-05, 14:48
by athenian200
TheRealMaestro wrote:
2019-12-03, 23:38
I would like to begin by stating how much I like Interlink; I started using it earlier this years as a way to access my Google-based academic inbox without letting Google approach my primary browser, and I have been impressed at its abilities. (The Moonscape theme is an especially nice touch.) In fact, I prefer using a specialised e-mail client now to Web-based clients. However, my personal inbox is hosted by Tutanota, and their FAQ states that they do not support IMAP because it cannot encrypt messages.

Encryption has never been that much of a concern for me; I use Tutanota because it does not mine my papers for data to sell and because it sees very little spam, while I have never made use of their encrypted sending feature. Would there be some manual way to make my Tutanota letters available in Interlink? If not, what would a suitable alternative be that does not mine data or get heavy spam? (I do not have any IT education at all, so hosting my own is out of the question.)
Off-topic:
Most free and secure e-mail services won't let you use an e-mail client because they're concerned about stuff like quantum secrecy and end-to-end encryption, and have a lot of black-box technologies powering that encryption that they would rather not share. A lot of inexpensive HIPAA or FERPA-compliant solutions e-mail only a link to a message's contents that requires login to see. It's significantly easier to lock things down 100% that way.

There are alternatives, though. For instance, you can use something like S/MIME to send encrypted e-mails to trusted recipients. The problem with that is, all the participants need to have an S/MIME certificate, and also need to have one another's certificates to be able to decrypt one another's e-mails. The advantage of this method is you don't have to trust the e-mail provider nearly as much because they couldn't read the contents of your e-mail due to encryption.

The e-mail provider doesn't control spam, spammers get your e-mail from places where you provide it (or from your friend's address books if they get hacked) and send messages. ISPs generally use a spam filter so you don't see them, but you could also use a spam filter with your e-mail client.

If you just want something that doesn't mine data, then pretty much any paid provider like HushMail will work. You just have to pay $3 a month or $50 a year, something about that price. But there's also Outlook.com. If you're paying for Office 365 already, you can also get a decent e-mail with no ads and 1TB of OneDrive space. It's a better deal than getting storage space and e-mail services separately if you need both, though of course in that case you have to decide for yourself whether you're comfortable trusting Microsoft to secure your e-mail from hackers and/or have a good customer data security and handling policy internally.