Your Email is Spying on You – But You Can Stop This!

We interviewed Arne Möhle, CEO of Tuta Mail, to learn how to stay private online — beyond using a private Hushed phone number.

1. What makes most mainstream email services such a privacy concern?

I like to compare your personal mailbox to your home – there’s a lot of private stuff in there that not everybody should be looking at. Just imagine you invite someone into your house for coffee, and when you come back from the kitchen you find them searching your drawers without having asked. I’m sure you’d kick them out of your house immediately.

Yet, this is exactly what Gmail and Outlook are doing – only it’s happening invisibly online.

They scan your emails, analyze your behavior, and build a profile of you. That data gets fed into ad machines or handed over to other parts of the Big Tech ecosystem.

Even if no human eyes are reading your messages, the surveillance still happens. And they know everything about you. Former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, once said: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

2. Tuta Mail takes a strong stance on encryption. What sets your approach apart?

To stay with the image of your house: At Tuta, we don’t just draw the curtains, we brick up the windows, reinforce the door, and lock everything up properly so no one can spy on you.

Most email providers just encrypt messages while they’re in transit; this is called transport layer encryption (TLS). But Tuta Mail encrypts everything end-to-end:

•     Subject lines
•     Email bodies
•     Attachments
•     Calendar events
•     Your entire address book

And here’s the cool part: we’ve built in quantum-resistant encryption, so your digital house is safe now and when the quantum computers of the future come knocking.

3. What are some of the hidden ways people’s emails are tracked, even when they aren’t aware of it?

If you’ve read up to hear, you’re probably worried that your mailbox is being watched. And let me assure you, that’s not paranoia – that’s tracking pixels.

These invisible pixels, included in images that load to your email from externally, are like digital peepholes. The moment you open an email, they whisper back to the sender:

“They opened it!”; “Here’s their location!”; “Here’s their device!”; “Here’s their IP address!”

This is marketing basics: All newsletters you receive contain tracking pixels, quietly hidden within the images. Good email clients – like Tuta Mail – block these tracking images from loading, which ultimately also blocks the tracking pixels. So the email client can make sure that your privacy is being protected, but most email providers simply don’t care. If they load newsletter images automatically, all data is leaked, and used for sending more newsletters or for targeting you with ads across other online services.

4. Why do people protect their phone numbers but overlook email as a privacy risk?

That’s hard for me to say. As a privacy enthusiast, I protect both, and make sure that neither my personal email address nor my personal phone number leaks into the wrong hands. But I could imagine that a phone number feels personal because you mainly use it for private communications, while emails feel practical. After all, you need your email not just for personal communication, but also for signing up for services or newsletters, communicating with officials and businesses and much more. But because of this, your email address needs even better protection! 

Your email is the key to your digital identity. It can unlock your bank account, your social media profiles, your subscriptions – everything.

So while people guard their phone numbers, they need to make sure that their email address is protected just as well. Tuta Mail with its extensive alias email addresses makes it easy to use different addresses for different purposes – so you can protect your digital identity easily.

5. How does Tuta empower people to break away from data-hungry platforms like Gmail and Outlook?

Tuta Mail is an email provider just like Gmail and Outlook – easy-to-use, with apps for iOS and Android, and completely free. Switching to Tuta can be done in a few clicks: Sign-up (which is possible even without a phone number) and set up an auto-forward rule on your old Gmail. This is all you need to get started. Of course, you can also import your contacts, calendars, and emails, and close the old email address for good. But before you do this, you need to make sure that you have changed the email address at every site you signed up with – otherwise you might run into access issues. That’s why we recommend to keep the old email address along with your new, secure Tuta Mail address for a while – so you can monitor for a while whether you still needed access to this old Facebook account you used years ago.

Once you’re set up with Tuta, you already benefit from its data protection and privacy. Tuta Mail is

• Open source
• Ad-free
• Anonymous
• Based in Germany (with strong privacy laws)

6. Are there simple, practical changes you recommend for someone just starting their privacy journey?

Totally. Most people think taking back their privacy online is a huge task, but you can start slowly, and do it step by step, not all at once. I’d recommend to start with the most important parts of your digital life. 

• A private email (Tuta)
• A private phone number (Hushed)
• An ad blocker (uBlock, etc.)
• A privacy-friendly browser (Brave, Firefox)

And most importantly: Start asking why services are free, and who benefits from your data.

7. How does something like a private phone number from Hushed complement private email use?

Email and phone numbers are like the twin locks on your front door. If one gets picked, the other isn’t safe for long. 

That’s why pairing Tuta and Hushed is a smart move. Together, they create a double layer of digital insulation that protects your identity from leaks, spam, and tracking.

8. What’s next for Tuta in the privacy space? Any big goals or product developments you’re excited about?

At Tuta our vision for the future is clear: Making the internet a better place, one where privacy is the default. We recently rebranded from Tutanota to Tuta to reflect this bigger vision: A space where privacy is the default – not the exception.

Our aim is that you can leave Google completely, and for this more collaboration tools are needed. That’s why we are not just building private email, but also offer a fully encrypted calendar and address book. 

We are already working on Tuta Drive – an encrypted cloud storage solution that also uses our quantum-resistant encryption protocol. This will be our biggest release in the coming months.

And, finally, let me say this: You wouldn’t live in a house with no locks – or walk through a city wearing a sign with all your personal info written on there. So why accept this kind of tracking online? Tools like Tuta and Hushed give you the freedom to step out of the spotlight and live your digital life in peace. Happy encrypting!