TutaCopied

In November 2023 the encrypted email service Tutanota announced that it had changed its name to Tuta. The company explained that it loved the original name and its meaning, secure message in Latin, but that it was not easy to share over the phone or remember in casual conversation. It had acquired the four-letter tuta.com domain, and said tuta itself means secure, safe or protected.

It's FOSS reported the change, noting that the service would now run on tuta.com with automatic redirects, making it the only private email service with such an accessible domain, and pointing out that its direct rival ProtonMail had rebranded to Proton the year before. The company said the rebrand would roll out step by step so Tuta stayed recognisable.

The new logo followed in May 2024, timed with the service's tenth anniversary. Tuta described it as a light switch that lets you turn on privacy the easy way, replacing the previous Tutanota logo, which it called a path towards privacy. The company tied the switch to how quickly users can sign up without giving a phone number or other identifying information.

Shortening the name is the obvious win. Four letters are easier to say, spell and type, and losing nota does not lose the meaning.

Tuta's blog told the domain story with relish. A brainstorm in summer 2022 found most short names already taken, but the team knew tuta.com belonged to someone in Brazil. A colleague, Vitor, who was travelling to São Paulo, met the owner in a restaurant, and after a splendid meal they signed a contract. The company said Tutanota, Latin for secure message, had been hard to share over the phone or remember in conversation, and that it was now the only secure email provider with a four-letter .com. That is the best argument for the rename: a privacy brand people cannot spell is a brand people cannot recommend.

The light switch is a tidy metaphor for privacy by default, and much more concrete than a path. Its only problem is genericness: switches and toggles are everywhere in interface design, so the mark will need its colour and wordmark to stay distinct.