Terror attacks are tragic. Terror attacks make each one of us long for security. That's why politicians repeatedly call for more surveillance after every terror attack. Most famously Theresa May, who wants to rip up human rights laws to fight terrorism. However, compelling data shows that more surveillance won't help at all: Every identified Islamist terrorist in Europe who killed innocent people with a terror attack since 2014 was already known to the authorities prior to the attack.

With just one year to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into force, privacy-focused online services have come together to highlight the crucial role of encryption in achieving GDPR compliance. As a key technology to protect employee and customer data, encryption helps organizations reduce GDPR compliance costs and avoid heavy fines.

The WannaCry ransomware attack that affected more than 200.000 computers was also the fault of the NSA and Microsoft. While Microsoft is now offering a patch, the lesson we have to learn from this attack is that we need a different approach so secure the Internet: The open source approach.

Two weeks ago a massive email bomb has been executed against Tutanota's main contact mailbox hello@tutao.de, which sent 500.000 newletters to this mailbox rendering it useless. The attacker has automatically signed up Tutanota's main mail address to thousands of online newsletters so that confirmation request mails hit the hello-mailbox continuously. Until we implemented a protection method around half a million unwanted mails were received.

On Friday we had to replace one broken hard drive. During this process mails that had already been deleted had been accidentally restored. This affected around 10.000 Tutanota users (around 0.5%), who were not able to access all mailbox folders (ie. inbox or drafts). We fixed this problem Saturday evening.

Only recently the American Senate passed S.J.Res 34, an anti-privacy law that allows American ISPs to sell their customers' internet history to the highest bidder. Now activism online against the bill is spreading like fire, one activist even started a fundraising campaign to buy politicians' browsing history. We think this idea is simply amazing and judging from a German example it might actually work.

We are excited to release Tutanota Three in private beta. This is our biggest update to Tutanota since we have started building our secure mail client with automatic encryption five years ago. We have re-build Tutanota from scratch to give it a fresh design, to improve performance and to make it fit for the future. Lots of Tutanota users have already signed up for the private beta and will now start testing our brand new client. The public beta will follow shortly, so stay tuned!

Since January 2017 secure mail service Tutanota is seeing an exponential growth in users. This trend has started in the second half of 2016, but has really taken off recently. Simultaneous to this development privacy-focused search engines like Qwant.com and duckduckgo.com are also growing quickly. The reasons - as our users tell us - are not only to be found in politics, but politics do play a big part.

Cloudflare published a serious bug in its software that revealed user passwords, authentication tokens and cookies of millions of websites. Tutanota was not affected as your secure mailbox does not use Cloudflare or any similar service. But if you are using your Tutanota password for any other service (which you shouldn't!), change it right away. It may be accessible to whoever is looking for it somewhere on the internet.

After the recent scandal revealing that Trump campaign aides have had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence in 2016, the entire Trump family seems to turn towards encryption to protect their private communication. Several encrypted Tutanota mailboxes were registered yesterday alone with distinct names of Trump family members.

Today is Data Privacy Day. Many people are still not aware of the importance of privacy and how it is being invaded on a day-to-day basis. Yet the invasion of our privacy affects each and every one of us, and it is crucial to spread the word about it.

Eight years ago many people hoped in vain that Obama would reduce NSA surveillance. Now many fear that US surveillance will become even worse under Trump's rule. But faith and fear are wrong guides when it comes to protecting your privacy: Precaution is what we all need.

This is Tutanota's transparency report and warrant canary information. While in Germany a gag order is legally not possible, we want to give you peace of mind by publishing a warrant canary.

With this update we have significantly improved spam handling by adding DKIM and DMARC to Tutanota. In addition we are changing our support system. Up to now we have answered all support requests. However, with well over one million users, we need to put more time into development than answering innumberable emails every day.

Five years ago we have started our journey to create the most secure email service. Today we see that a growing number of people around the world are turning to encrypted email because they understand the value of their data. This gives us reason to celebrate because only with strong end-to-end encryption we can protect our right to privacy!

Every second person already distrusts companies in using their personal data correctly. Interviews done by Boston Consulting in Europe and in the USA show that this figure could grow immensely as more and more data breaches become public.

In Germany journalists uncovered that the browser add-on Web of Trust (WOT) saves users' surf history to sell this data. While the company claims that the data being sold is anonymized, the journalists were able to identify several users, among those journalists, judges, policemen and politicians of the German government.

It is still unbelievable to us that Yahoo gave access to all their email accounts to US authorities. This recent publication of years and years of online surveillance shows again how easy it is to monitor everybody - when the data is not being encrypted. This is why Tutanota encrypts all mailboxes by default.

Today is German Unity Day: On October 3rd in 1990, Germany became one. At the same time it became a truly democratic country. The oppressive system of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was ended and with it an immense surveillance apparatus disappeared. This is an extremely joyful moment to all Germans, yet, it also has to remind us that we can't take the freedoms we currently enjoy for granted.

Last Sunday Swiss people voted in favour of a surveillance law which will enable Swiss intelligence agencies to tap phones and snoop on email. 65,5% of the Swiss voted in favour of it. This is the first direct vote in favour of more surveillance in Europe. Does that mean the majority of us wants to be monitored?

Last week we were notified by Kevin Froman that your secure mailbox was not safe from the "Target Blank" vulnerability. We fixed this severe vulnerability immediately so that it cannot be exploited.

This week we are celebrating our first Premium release one year ago. The low price for Premium of only 1 Euro per month immediately led to thousands of users upgrading, simply because they wanted to support our privacy-focused email service.

Democracies have created powerful surveillance structures, similar to the ones already being used by current despots. Out of fear from terrorists democratically elected governments around the world have limited everybody's basic rights as citizens. Future authoritarian politicians will use this power against their own enemies: journalists, the opposition, human rights activists, and many, many more.

We are happy to announce that we plan to release a completely new client! We are currently improving your secure email service from scratch, which will greatly improve speed and design.

The Islamic terror has reached Europe, and the only weapon we have against it is an ever increasing surveillance of the general public. At least that’s what Politicians want us to believe. But it is wrong.

Tutanota and Qabel share one goal: Every piece of data has to be encrypted. By developing software that automatically encrypts all data end-to-end, we want to achieve that encryption becomes mainstream. This will enable us to put an end to the illegal mass surveillance online.

All Tutanota users - Premium or Free - can get five additional aliases with today's edition of the German magazine Computer Bild. Soon we will also release alias packages so that everybody can add as many aliases as necessary.

Two years after our first beta release of Tutanota, we have now reached one million users! This is big step for online security because Tutanota automatically encrypts emails end-to-end. Already every second email sent with Tutanota is end-to-end encrypted. This makes illegal mass surveillance of Tutanota mailboxes impossible.

We are happy to release Tutanota version 2.9 (desktop only, mobile apps will be updated later). This release includes multi selection for desktop and some bug fixes.

More than four years ago we started building Tutanota. The challenge we were faced with was automatising the key exchange so that every user can encrypt their emails without any hassle. But at the same time we had to make sure that we don't have access to the private keys of our users.

We are happy to announce the release of a draft feature to your Tutanota mailbox. This is great new feature which will improve the usability of Tutanota a lot. Many more features will follow this year!

As several of you have noticed, we have a new addition to our Support Team: Meike. We are very happy to welcome Meike and to have her on board here at Tutanota! Most of your questions to us will be answered by her while technical requests are mainly handled by one of our developers.

At Tutanota we are building the fully encrypted communication platform of the future. With our open source project Tutanota we aim at making the web open, secure and accessible for everyone. Now we want you to join our team!

This week the German company Vodafone started an encrypted email service for businesses called 'Secure Email'. We welcome their contribution in making our communication as a whole more secure. It is always good to have competition so that we work even harder in making Tutanota the easiest and most secure email service available to everybody!

Four years ago we have started our open source project as entrepreneurs at Leibniz University Hanover. Even back then - two years before the Snowden revelations - we were appalled by the common use of surveillance techniques to which email was and is very exposed. We wanted to build the easiest and most secure email service to stop the snooping on all citizens.

Tuesday (24-11-15) night - starting at 10 pm CET - there is a planned maintenance of our servers. This might lead to short downtimes of Tutanota until Wednesday (25-11-15) morning 6 am CET.

Switzerland plans to revise their data retention law BÜPF so that all communication data (post, email, phone, text messages, ip addresses) can be stored for 12 months. The opponents of this law even say that it would allow the monitoring of mobile phones and the installation of trojans on computers, tablets and mobile phones.

We are happy to release Tutanota 2.3.1. This release just contains a couple of bug fixes.

We are happy to release Tutanota 2.3. You will now find a spam folder in your inbox. This enable us to toughen the spam protection because we don't block spam at the server anymore, thus, giving you full control.

Today 404 German politicians have passed a data retention law making Germany yet another one in the long list of countries introducing data retention to 'fight terrorism'. Only 25 years after the end of the German surveillance state GDR, this law once again puts all German citizens under heavy surveillance.

The recent ruling by the European Court of Justice that declared the safe harbor agreement between the US and the EU as invalid was a great victory for data protection. After the Snowden leaks it became clear that data stored in the US was not safe from surveillance that would be illegal in Europe.

Many NPOs fight political, humanitarian or social causes for the betterment of our global societies. We want to support these organizations. All NPOs can get the secure email service Tutanota Premium with a reduction of 50%, so for only 6 Euro per year.

One of our aims at Tutanota is to fight mass surveillance. End-to-end encrypted emails are important to reach this goal. About 37% of all emails sent from Tutanota are already end-to-end encrypted.

Tutanota is an open source webmail client available in more than 30 languages already. We want everybody to be able to use Tutanota in the easiest way. Join in and translate Tutanota so we can add your language!

We were rather shocked when we heard about the upcoming Lavaboom shut-down next week. The Lavaboom team was building an encrypted webmail service similar to Tutanota, which seemed very promising. We express our sympathy for Lavaboom and wish their team all the best for the future.

Everybody wants your data. Not just the NSA. Google, Facebook, your phone provider, even your torch app and your local store. Yet, we have to share messages all the time with friends and colleagues, with family and civil services. The only chance we have that this information is not monitored by default is end-to-end encryption.

We are excited to finally release Tutanota Premium. Upgrade your account to Premium for only 1 Euro per month immediately and claim a 5 GB extension of your account at no additional cost. This special offer will expire in two weeks.

We've partnered with Golden Frog to enhance your security online. Golden Frog is offering all our users an exclusive special for VyprVPN with 1 GB for free.

We have limited the number of emails that you can send each day to 100. While this is enough for most of our users, unfortunately some have started misusing Tutanota for sending out spam.

We have to apologize that with our last update of Tutanota we missed a bug where some emails could not be opened or deleted. This has been fixed now.

Our open source Android and iOS apps make end-to-end encrypted on mobile incredibly easy. For a maximum of privacy, you can get the Android app directly from our website so that you do not depend on Google services.

We are happy to let you know that Tutanota 1.9.3 is ready! Now with spam protection and preventing of image loading for a better protection of your privacy.

Everybody has the right to whisper. We want that everybody has the right to whisper online as well. That's why your Tutanota encrypted emails can also be accessed via the Tor browser.

After one year of beta testing we are now ready to strip off the diapers! Today Tutanota is leaving its beta phase with the release of brand-new domains: tutanota.com, tuta.io, tutamail.com and keemail.me. Now you can add one free alias to your account.

Following our Android app release in December, we are happy to present the official Tutanota iOS app!

Tutanota uses DANE (DNS-based Authentification of Named Entities). This technology binds the SSL key information to a domain name (DNS) and protects that binding with DNSSEC. DANE makes Man-in-the-Middle attacks practically impossible.