How to Move from Tuta to Another Email Provider

To move from Tuta to another email provider you do the work in four passes: export your mail out of the Tuta client as .eml files, open an account somewhere that speaks IMAP, upload that archive into the new mailbox, and then re-point every login, contact and subscription that still sends to the Tuta address. Only after that do you close the Tuta account.

The reason this is not the usual provider switch is that Tuta does not offer IMAP, POP or SMTP. Every normal migration tool — the importers built into Gmail, Fastmail and Proton, and every third-party mailbox-copy service — works by logging into the old mailbox over IMAP and reading it. There is nothing for them to log into. You are the transport layer.

This guide is written for people who like Tuta's encryption model and are leaving for a specific reason: they want a desktop or mobile client of their own choosing, a mail rule that talks to something else, or an archive they can grep. Nothing below is a criticism of Tuta's design. The trade-off you are unwinding is the one Tuta chose on purpose.

What actually moves, and what doesn't#

Almost none of a Tuta account is portable in the way a Gmail or Fastmail account is. Message bodies and attachments come out as files. Structure, settings and identity mostly do not.

Knowing the split up front stops the most common mistake, which is closing the Tuta account after the mail has been exported but before the address has been unwired from thirty other services.

Why leaving Tuta is not a normal provider switch#

Tuta encrypts message bodies, subjects and attachments in the client before anything reaches its servers. The server holds ciphertext it cannot read. IMAP, POP3 and SMTP all assume a server that can read, filter and hand over plaintext, so Tuta does not expose them — that is a design decision, not a missing feature, and it has been consistent for years.

The practical consequence is that the only process that can read your mailbox is a signed-in Tuta client. So the export is manual, it is done from inside the app, and it happens on your own machine. Budget real time for it if you have years of mail.

Pre-migration checklist#

Do all of this before you export a single message. The order matters more than the speed.

• Search your Tuta mailbox for "password reset", "verify your email" and "receipt" and list every service that still points at the Tuta address.
• Note which of those are hard to change later: bank, tax portal, domain registrar, two-factor recovery addresses, Apple or Google account recovery.
• Check your Tuta plan. Whether inbox rules and forwarding-style features are available to you depends on which plan you are on, so confirm what your account actually has in Settings rather than assuming.
• If you use a custom domain with Tuta, find the DNS records you will need to change — that is the switch that moves mail flow, and it is the one that can be reversed fastest.
• Decide on the destination before exporting, because it determines whether you want .eml files, .mbox, or both.
• Free up disk space. Attachments are the bulk of most mailboxes and the export is uncompressed once you unzip it.

Step 1–4: exporting and landing your mail#

1. 1

   Export from the Tuta client, folder by folder

   Open Tuta on desktop or web, select a folder, select the messages, and use the export action. Tuta gives you .eml files, delivered as a .zip when you select a batch. Work one folder at a time and name each zip after the folder — this is what lets you rebuild the structure later. Do not select the entire mailbox at once on a large account; a failed 6 GB export tells you nothing about which messages made it.

2. 2

   Verify the export before you trust it

   Unzip one folder and count the files against the message count Tuta shows. Open three messages at random, including one with an attachment and one with a non-Latin subject line. An export that produced files but lost attachments looks identical to a good one until you open it.

3. 3

   Open the destination account and connect it to a client

   Create the new mailbox and set it up in a desktop client over IMAP — Thunderbird, Apple Mail, eM Client, anything that lets you drag messages into a folder. This client is your import tool. Create the same folder names you exported from before you move anything into it.

4. 4

   Upload the archive into the new mailbox

   Drag the .eml files from each exported folder into the matching IMAP folder in the client, one folder at a time, and wait for the upload to finish before starting the next. The client writes them to the server over IMAP, so once it syncs, the mail is genuinely in the new account and not just on your laptop. Messages will carry their original dates but arrive unread.

Choosing a destination that supports standard clients#

"Supports IMAP" is less binary than it looks, and this is where people leaving Tuta most often land somewhere with the same constraint they were trying to escape.

Verify the current state of any of these on the vendor's own page before you commit — this is a category where access models change, and the details below are as of September 2026.

Tuta to Proton Mail, specifically#

This is the most common destination for people leaving Tuta, because the privacy posture is the closest match. It is also the migration where the most people expect an automatic importer and find none.

Proton's import tooling is built to log into an old mailbox over IMAP, which Tuta does not offer. So the Tuta-to-Proton path is the same manual one: export .eml from Tuta, then upload those files into Proton using Proton's import tooling or a desktop client connected through Proton's bridge. Both of those sit behind a paid Proton plan and run on desktop, which is a real constraint to check before you start rather than after.

What breaks when you leave#

The mail is the easy part. What actually costs people a weekend is everything that was quietly pointing at the old address.

Doing it without downtime#

Run both mailboxes at once. There is no forwarding-based shortcut you should rely on here: whether any forwarding-style feature is available to your Tuta account depends on your plan, and even where it exists, forwarding a message out of an end-to-end encrypted system means it leaves decrypted. Check Settings for what your plan gives you, and treat anything you find there as a convenience, not the migration.

The overlap is the actual mechanism. Send from the new address from day one, keep reading Tuta daily, and every time something arrives at Tuta that is not a newsletter, go change that address at the source. After two weeks the arrivals thin out. After a month, what is left is annual renewals and people you have not spoken to in a year.

• Day 0: new mailbox live, archive imported, contacts and calendar moved.
• Days 1–30: send from the new address only; check Tuta once a day and re-point every sender that matters.
• Day 30: review what still arrives at Tuta. If it is all noise, you are done re-pointing.
• Day 31+: close the Tuta account — cancel any subscription first, then terminate the account from Settings in the app.

Rollback plan#

Until you delete the Tuta account, this migration is fully reversible, and that is the whole reason for the 30-day gap between "done" and "closed". If the new provider disappoints you — the client support is worse than advertised, the spam filtering is too aggressive, the search is slow — you go back to reading Tuta and you have lost nothing but the import time.

After deletion there is no rollback. The address is not reissued, the mailbox is gone, and any password-protected external conversations that lived in Tuta's system go with it. Keep your exported archive even after the switch feels settled; it is the only copy of anything Tuta held.

Where AI Emaily fits#

We build AI Emaily, so treat this as the interested party's paragraph. It is not a migration tool and it will not move your Tuta mail — nothing can, automatically, because there is no IMAP to read from. Where it is relevant is the mailbox you land in: AI Emaily connects over IMAP as well as Gmail and Outlook, so once your archive is uploaded to a standard-IMAP destination, it can read the old mail alongside the new. That matters most for the thing a fresh mailbox is worst at — finding the 2023 thread you half-remember — because semantic search works across the imported archive, not just what arrived after the switch. It is a 7-day free trial on Pro or Autopilot, and the agent drafts from a Context brain you write yourself rather than from your mail history.