With included German goverment backdoor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337507

Thanks for the link. I am actually not happy they did not mention this court case in the page I posted above. But the thread you linked also does not clarify the details.

Their clients are open source so you should be able to build them yourself. https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/blob/master/doc/BUILDING.m...

How would that court requirement work ?

>How would that court requirement work ?

Yeah that's the technical detail no judge has any interest in solving ;) ....like upload filters..

If choosing between a German backdoor vs a likely US backdoor, the Germans are probably a better choice for non-Europeans worried about security.

Why? Germany participates as an auxiliary collaborator of the Five Eyes [1] intelligence alliance.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R45720.pdf

If the Five Eyes countries and their intelligence services are in your threat model you've likely already lost.

Are you saying ProtonMail has a US back door?

ProtonMail is nominally based in Switzerland, so I would assume that any backdoor in their software is controlled by the Swiss.

Although I see their CTO is based in the US so it is certainly possible.

Probably a poignant time to point out that CryptoAG was based in Switzerland for half a century and highly trusted around the world yet controlled by the CIA the whole time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

I know I only skimmed the article, but at the end of the day they need the plain-text of my email to send it forward so that my Gmail friends can receive it.

Your gmail friend gets a link to their "secure inbox" that they can only view by providing the password you assigned them when you sent them the email. It's a shared password that you need to provide them by _some_ means. I believe the encryption and decryption is all done in the browser (yours and theirs), so tutanota never has the plain text.

It's also one of the few free email providers I've seen that doesn't require a phone number.

everyone need to switch to Matrix E2E messaging... including all signup forms on all websites.

How secure is it compared to ProtonMail?

How secure is ProtonMail?