Cologne court forces Tutanota to make entire mailboxes transparent

The Cologne District Court has instructed Tutanota, the encrypted mail service, to make users’ mailboxes accessible and to display the text of e-mails in plain text at the request of the authorities.

Tutanota is appealing the decision of the Cologne court to make email inboxes accessible, but an appeal has no suspensive effect. A Tutanova spokeswoman told Heise that the Hanover-based company has therefore already begun to build in a feature that enables the surveillance of mailboxes. This could be removed again in the event of a successful appeal procedure.

The case involved an extortion email sent to a car supplier from a Tutanota account. North Rhine-Westphalia police summoned the company to view the inbox. The Cologne court ruled that Tutanota must make this possible, because the webmail service ‘cooperates in the provision of telecommunication services’.

Heise points out that the ruling is not in line with earlier rulings, in which it was stated that Tutanota does not provide or participate in a telecommunication service in a legal sense and therefore cannot be obliged to cooperate with the German Telekommunikationsüberwachung, the inspection by authorities of telecommunications. The Cologne court also does not state in its judgment which telecommunications service Tutanota cooperates with. Tutanota calls the statement ‘absurd’.

Tutanota was previously forced by a German court to make individual encrypted email messages available in plain text at the request of authorities. At the time, this was not end-to-end encryption, which the company applies when two Tutanota accounts communicate with each other. The current ruling concerns entire mailboxes that must be able to be supervised by the authorities.