Who can demand your emails? What transparency reports show

Which country's courts can order your email provider to hand over data, what the transparency reports of Proton, Tuta, and Posteo count, and what encryption does not protect.

Key points

An email provider has to follow the law of the country it is based in. Courts there can order it to hand over data or to watch an account.
In 2025, Proton received 9,301 legal orders, and Posteo 85 requests. Tuta reports that it rejected 75 percent of all requests from authorities that year.
Encryption protects mail that is already stored. It does not stop a court from ordering a provider to log a specific account from then on.

The country decides

	Based in	Servers, as the provider states
Hushmail	Canada	Vancouver and Calgary, Canada
Posteo	Berlin, Germany	Frankfurt, Germany
Proton Mail	Geneva, Switzerland	Switzerland, Germany, or Norway
Tuta	Hanover, Germany	Germany

In July 2025, Proton announced that it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland, because of legal uncertainty about Swiss proposals for mass surveillance. It named its AI assistant Lumo as the first product to move.

Hushmail’s privacy policy says that it discloses data under orders enforceable under the laws of British Columbia, Canada, and that “the records we disclose may include data in an unencrypted format.” It may also be required to store the password of an account named in such an order. It does not tell users whether it has received an order.

What the reports count

	2025	2024
Proton	9,301 legal orders; 8,313 complied with, 988 contested	11,023 legal orders; 10,368 complied with, 655 contested
Tuta	447 requests; data released in 112 cases	336 requests; data released in 94 cases
Posteo	85 requests; content of 2 mailboxes released, user data in no case	78 requests; content of 10 mailboxes released

Tuta reports by half-year and by type of data; the figures above are the sums. The figures are not directly comparable, because each provider counts differently: Proton counts orders, Tuta requests per type of data, and Posteo the mailboxes whose content it released.

What encryption protects, and what it does not

Encryption protects stored mail. Posteo reports that one of four seizure orders in 2025 could not be carried out because crypto mail storage was on. Tuta states that plain-text emails that arrived before an order “have already been encrypted on the server and cannot be decrypted by us.”

From the moment of an order, a provider can be made to watch an account. In 2021, Proton received a binding order from Swiss authorities in the case of a climate activist. Proton wrote that under Swiss law, it can be forced to collect information on accounts of users under Swiss criminal investigation. In a later post, it wrote that it does not keep permanent IP logs by default, but may have to log specific users under a court order. Proton says it could not hand over any messages.

Tuta lists such “real-time” requests separately. In 2025, it released real-time content data in 22 cases.

Metadata stays readable for the provider. At Proton Mail and Tuta, the provider can see the email addresses of sender and recipient and the time of each message.

What you can do

Read the provider’s transparency report before you choose. It shows how often authorities ask and how often the provider says no.
Use end-to-end encryption for sensitive mail. Then a provider has only scrambled text to hand over.
Hide your IP address from your email provider with a VPN. If a provider has to log the IP addresses of an account, it then sees the address of the VPN server.

Next step

How end-to-end encryption works, and what it leaves visible, is explained in the guide End-to-end encrypted email, explained.