Tutanota is no longer using the term Blacklist.

In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement Tutanota eliminates the term Blacklist.

2020-06-22

The Tutanota email client has never used any racially insensitive terms such as blacklist. However, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, we have now revised our FAQ and How-to to replace some phrases with neutral descriptions.

Spam and no spam

In Tutanota spam rules are handled in such a way that users can define senders, domains, even top level domains as 'Spam' or 'No spam'. These racially neutral terms are unproblematic and we will keep them.

However, we do use the term blacklist and whitelist in the FAQ and How-to, mainly so that people searching for these terms will be able to find the corresponding FAQ and How-to entries, which explain how to set up spam rules in Tutanota.

This is problematic because terms such as 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' reinforce the notion that black is bad and white is good.

Replacements in FAQ & How-to

We have now replaced these terms in all headlines and texts. We will only leave the word 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' as a tag so that people who continue to search for these terms will be able to find the correcponding entries. As these terms are fixed phrases in many languages, it would make things too complex for many users if we removed them entirely.

However, as we have removed these terms from the headlines and the main texts, and never used them in the Tutanota mail client, we hope to be able to fully eliminate them soon.

Author

Black and white picture of Matthias thinking and looking to the right side.

Matthias is co-founder and developer of Tuta, focusing on backend development, architecture and email processing. He writes code and political comments to fight for our human right to privacy. He wants to create an encrypted cloud collaboration platform which is so easy to use and so secure that it locks out all the spies. We all deserve a better internet - one where privacy is the default.