Setting up Tuta Mail & Nextcloud Integration in Simple Steps

05 Oct, 2026

This post was last edited 0 minutes ago.

I begin writing this as a set of instructions addressed to one of my kids who might use the Tuta/Nextcloud integration, hence the use of second person.

Tuta Mail

I just heard the news that Tuta Mail and Nextcloud have started working together! Let me explain how you can set this up and why it might be worth your while.

Preamble

You've been using Tuta Mail for several years now, and you also have accounts on our family Nextcloud server, where you can store things like Minecraft backups, school files, and larger video files for editing.

Tuta Mail lets you have email without a company reading the content or metadata of your emails and selling that on to advertisers. Nextcloud is hosted by me on the computer on the floor next to my desk, and so you can safely store your files there without anyone looking at them, as long as you trust me to back them up for you.

This week, I heard on the Surveillance Report podcast that Tuta and Nextcloud have started a partnership. You can now read your Tuta Mail from within the Nextcloud dashboard in your browser, and you can save any attachment sent to your Tuta Mail directly to your Nextcloud storage. For now, this only works on desktop computers and laptops, not on mobile.

It is very easy to set up. I did it in five minutes myself, and thought I'd describe the steps below for you.

1. Activate the Tuta plugin in Nextcloud

Open your browser and log into our family Nextcloud server. If you now click on the 9 dot menu icon in the upper left-hand corner, you'll see a new Tuta plugin. I have added that as the Nextcloud family server administrator:

Tuta plugin NC

When you click on the Tuta icon, you'll see this login screen for Tuta Mail:

If you add your email address and password there, then you'll see your inbox on display inside the Nextcloud user interface in your browser:

Tuta inbox in NC

2. Activate Nextcloud integration in Tuta Mail

You can also add Nextcloud integration from the other end, so from within your Tuta Mail app or from Tuta Mail in any browser you might use.

First, you need to go to your Settings menu in Tuta Mail, which is the cog wheel in the lower left-hand corner. When you click on that, you'll see the Plugins icon:

Tuta Mail NC Plugins icon

Click that to activate the Nextcloud plugin. When you switch the toggle to ON, you'll be asked to fill in the address of our family server. I've added a bogus address here for the sake of the demonstration:

Activate Nextcloud plugin in Tuta Mail

You can leave the name of the folder for attachments to TutaAttachments or you can change it to something else.

3. Store your first Tuta attachment in Nextcloud

I've sent a test email here with a screenshot attachment of Techlore's announcement about their new digital privacy lessons, called Incognito V2. When I click on the attachment, I now see the option to store it in Nextcloud:

Save to Nextcloud

These next few steps you'll only need to once. When you first click on Save to Nextcloud you'll see this prompt:

If you click on Log in, you can grant Tuta access to our Nextcloud server:

Grant access

Click on that and type in your own Nextcloud password:

Type password NC

You will now see the new TutaAttachments folder:

TutaAttachments folder in NC

and when you click on that, you'll see the saved attachment:

Inside TutaAttachments folder

You can then either view the photo in Nextcloud or download it.

That's it!

Why is this collaboration good?

Being able to save email attachments directly in our family Nextcloud ensures that the file is backed up. It also skips all the extra steps normally involved in handling attachments (downloading, finding the Downloads folder, moving the file to the appropriate location).

You can do what you want with the file in Nextcloud. You can download it from there, or open it directly in Nextcloud, edit it and move or copy it to another location.

During a busy period, you could just quickly save important attachments with the click of a button and deal with these at the end of the week.

With this integration, your Nextcloud dashboard can become your main portal for everything: email, files, calendar, notes, video calls, etc. Though I haven't seen one for Tuta yet, you can add widgets (like your calendar) to your Nextcloud dashboard and make that your browser home page.

I am excited about this collaboration. I can see Nextcloud/Tuta integration working well for schools. Tuta say they are working on their own cloud storage, but this seems to be taking time, and Nextcloud, with its wide range of plugins, offers so much more than cloud storage.

It's not perfect yet

As mentioned, I couldn't find a plugin for Tuta Mail in the list of widgets for my Nextcloud Dashboard. Mail integration with the Dashboard would be handy.

While it's now easy to store attachments to Nextcloud, the reverse doesn't seem to work. When I try attaching a file to a mail I want to send, I don't see an option to find the file in Nextcloud.

I do see my Nextcloud folder on my computer hard drive, but that's because I have the Nextcloud application installed there. I could auto-sync my TutaAttachments folder to my PC drive, but this is already a more roundabout method. I hope direct integration for adding attachments will follow.

These plugins and integrations are not yet available on the mobile apps for Tuta and Nextcloud. I hope they will be extended to those soon.

As far as I can tell, Nextcloud integration only works for paid subscriptions of Tuta Mail.

Great moves forward for privacy

With all the negative privacy news (cameras, face recognition glasses, deliberately addictive tools built for kids, AI, identity apps), I can say that these are exciting times for privacy tools. This week, I discovered that the companies of two tools I use every day have decided to work together in a way that puts the customer and their privacy first.

Secondly, there was news that Signal users can now create accounts without a phone number (though you still have some identification through a one-time payment for this service to discourage bots). Additionally, privacy-first companies like Signal seem to be making an effort to develop versions of their apps for alternative mobile systems, like Ubuntu Touch.

Finally, on the Linux & Open Source News podcast, I keep hearing reports about European companies and government bodies moving their entire digital workflows from Microsoft or Google over to open source platforms like Nextcloud, which is so encouraging. For those trying to save money and protect their users' data, a transfer to solid open source alternatives is a no-brainer, and it's great people are beginning to see the light on that issue.

I hope to see these positive trends continue and for more companies to collaborate like Tuta and Nextcloud. This week at least, it's full steam ahead for digital privacy!