Email is supposed to be private. When you seal an envelope and drop it in a letterbox, you expect nobody to open it and read it before it reaches the recipient. Yet for the past two decades, the world's most popular email providers have done exactly that — scanning your messages to build advertising profiles, training machine learning models on your private correspondence, and storing your emails on servers they fully control.
Tobava Mail is our answer to this problem. It is a privacy-first email service built on the principle that your email is yours — not a dataset, not an advertising signal, not a product to be monetised.
The three dominant email providers — Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail — offer their services for free. That model works because they monetise user data. Gmail's advertising system is deeply integrated with email content. Microsoft scans messages for spam and security, retaining metadata. Yahoo has faced multiple high-profile data breaches affecting billions of accounts.
None of this is secret. It is disclosed, in fine print, in terms of service that almost nobody reads. The result is that the most personal communications in most people's lives — medical updates, financial discussions, relationship conversations — are processed by advertising companies.
There are alternatives. ProtonMail pioneered end-to-end encrypted email and has earned a strong reputation. Tutanota offers similar protections from Germany. Fastmail provides a clean, fast service with a reasonable privacy policy. These are all good products. Tobava Mail is built with the same privacy commitments, integrated directly into the Tobava platform for users who already rely on Tobava Search, Health, and Travel.
End-to-end encryption. Messages sent between Tobava Mail users are encrypted on your device before they leave it. Only you and your recipient hold the keys. Tobava's servers store only encrypted ciphertext — we cannot read your messages even if we wanted to, and even in the event of a server breach, your message content is unreadable.
Zero advertising. We do not scan your emails. We do not build advertising profiles. We do not sell data to third parties. Tobava Mail is a paid service — our revenue comes from subscriptions, not from your inbox.
No content scanning for any purpose. Some providers claim to have stopped advertising-related scanning while continuing to scan messages for "personalisation" or "smart features." Tobava Mail does not perform content scanning of any kind on your messages beyond the spam and malware filtering every email service requires to function.
Australian jurisdiction. Tobava is operated from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Your data is subject to Australian law, including the Privacy Act 1988. Australia is not part of the Five Eyes signals intelligence sharing arrangement in the context of routine email surveillance — requests for user data require legal process.
The privacy protections in Tobava Mail go beyond simply not reading your messages. A full privacy-first email service needs to protect metadata as well as content.
IP address protection. When you send an email via Tobava Mail, your IP address is stripped from the message headers before delivery. Recipients and their mail servers cannot see where you sent the message from.
Tracking pixel blocking. Marketing emails often include invisible tracking pixels — tiny images that report back to the sender when you open the email, and from what device and location. Tobava Mail blocks all external image loading by default, preventing tracking pixels from firing.
Minimal metadata retention. We retain only what is necessary to deliver your email and operate the service. We do not log which emails you open, when you open them, or what links you click.
A direct comparison is useful here. Gmail is free, has excellent spam detection, and integrates tightly with Google's productivity suite. The trade-off is comprehensive data collection and advertising integration. If Gmail's privacy model is acceptable to you, it is an excellent product. If it is not — as it is not for many people with legitimate privacy concerns — the trade-off is unacceptable.
ProtonMail is the most established privacy-focused email provider. It is based in Switzerland under Swiss law, has a long track record, and is open source. For users who specifically want Swiss jurisdiction or who are already using Proton's VPN and other products, ProtonMail is an excellent choice.
Tobava Mail is designed for users in the Tobava ecosystem — people who want a private search engine, private travel search, and private email all from one provider, under Australian law, without switching between multiple services and accounts.
Tobava Mail is available at mail.tobava.com. You can create a free account with a tobavamail.com address. Paid plans with custom domain support and expanded storage are available from the account settings page.
If you are migrating from Gmail or another provider, the settings page includes an import tool that retrieves your existing messages via IMAP and imports them into your Tobava Mail account. Your existing email history does not need to be abandoned when you switch.
Tobava Mail is included with Tobava accounts. Get started at mail.tobava.com →