I’m one of the first 1000 users of Tutanota, and I can confidently tell you there are NO good email providers!
Email itself seems doomed to centralization and surveillance because the original designers didn’t anticipate a duopoly.
About Tutanota; it asks me to “refresh” on every single visit and if I refresh while logged in, it kicks me out. But why??? It’s a website, it should either be smart enough to fetch the newest version upon request, or shut up about new versions!
Outlook isn’t any better. Which outlook? you say? Well of course there’s two of them and they both suck! Exchange as a service is “ok out of ten”, at least it doesn’t sell your data or train AI models on your emails like the consumer version does.
On that “Coaching by Copilot” feature, the whole Outlook experience appears to be geared towards the dumbest possible user, but considering how I’ve seen C-suite execs write, maybe they do need some coaching.
Gmail is possibly the worst offender, combining AI and data exploitation. A sidebar pops up randomly (or whenever Google thinks you might need it?) and recommends you summarize, auto-gen a reply, or list “action items”.
There’s no opt-out. The only option is worse software that gets in your way. You will use the AI, you will give your data for training purposes, and you will reload the web page for no apparent reason or you won’t have email.
Delta Chat gets an honorable mention here. It’s an email* client that’s more like 2010’s Telegram without any of the polish. As a chat client it’s not great, but if you’re using it as an email client+server with the understanding that email is barely private, it’s pretty decent.
That’s all. Maybe I need to make an email experience that’s not awful, but then again email itself is awful; its a security minefield, its not designed for privacy, and it should’ve been retired decades ago.
