Microsoft is blocking Tutanota email addresses from registering a MS Teams account

Microsoft is actively blocking Tutanota email addresses from registering a Microsoft Teams account.

Tutanota is an end-to-end encrypted email app and a freemium secure email service, as of March 2017, Tutanota’s owners claimed to have over 2 million users.

The news is that Microsoft is actively blocking Tutanota email addresses from registering a Microsoft Teams account.

“Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are discussing stronger antitrust legislation to regulate Big Tech – and such laws are badly needed as the blocking of Tutanota users from Microsoft Teams demonstrates. Big Tech companies have the market power to harm smaller competitors with some very easy steps like refusing smaller companies’ customers from using their own services.” reads a comment shared by the German email service provider. “Currently, Microsoft is actively blocking Tutanota email addresses from registering a Microsoft Teams account. This severe anti-competitive practice forces our customers to register a second email address – possibly one from Microsoft themselves – to create a Teams account.”

Microsoft doesn’t recognize the company as an email service but as a corporate address.

The first time that a Tutanota user registered a Teams account, its domain was recognized as a corporation, for this reason, any other users of the popular email service were not able to register its account and were requested to contact their admin. 

“We repeatedly tried to solve the issue with Microsoft, but unfortunately our request was ignored”, says Matthias Pfau, co-founder of Tutanota.

“Microsoft would only have to change the settings that Tutanota is an email service so that everyone can register an individual account but they (Microsoft) say such a change is not possible.”

Let’s see if Microsoft will solve the issue, allowing 2 million users to use its MS Teams service.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Microsoft)