> Perhaps what makes the ruse convincing in Tutanota's case is the crappy interface and clear dearth of basic features: search basically doesn't work; it's impossible to select all messages or use shift to select pages of messages. Their excuse is that customers might accidentally delete emails, but it might make more sense that they want to retain as much data as possible: https://www.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/nc9jxx/suggestion...

Implementing search for E2EE mailbox is difficult problem (Protonmail is not doing the same). For search to be efficient, you would need to download the whole mailbox for your device. If you want to support as many users as possible, you can't. But maybe they could make it optional.

And they are very small team, offering mail for very low price (free for most), which has resulted on using Electron for producing the applications for as many platforms as possible. And it is a mess.

What comes to that Reddit post, it is two years old and they have supported mass selection for a long while for now.

My naive thought is that they could have an E2EE search index for each mailbox? I wouldn't even mind if the index storage counts against the quota.

Index processing should happen on the client's device (server never sees the content). That defeats the purpose since you need full mailbox on your device for that. At least in the beginning.

Maybe over longer period it would be possible to integrate and maintain the index so, that you can guarantee the correctness without full mailbox.

Tuta is not in Five Eyes jurisdiction, it is in Germany.

No but it is in 14 eyes.

Both proton and tuta cripple search so that deleting mail detritus is tedious so that you'll use up your free storage quota and have to subscribe.