Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour
... I think the best you can do is go with a big enough one that you know things will get reported long before they impact you personally. There are lots of very small outfits that in some cases are run by just a handful of people. No matter what they claim, no one knows what goes on behind the scenes. On the other hand, you are guaranteed that something like Fastmail, Gmail, or Outlook is being probed, prodded, and tested every day. IMHO the biggest danger for most of us is not government snooping but instead plain old hackery looking to steal our information in order to log into our bank accounts, etc. The other big danger is that a service will have major bugs or outages due to inadequate infrastructure. Which again argues for going with a large, well-tested provider.
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Keep in mind that there are more than 7 billion people on this planet and while not all of them have email, many have more than one and nearly every business and org has many as well. Even the most sophisticated snoop programs would have great difficulty monitoring everything like Mr. Finch's Machine. So they screen for key words and phrases. Encrypted services are more "suspect" by the programs that search for terror keywords and phrases, than simply using PGP on your computer and your recipient's. Also, if you are not using OTF encryption on your hard disk like employees of Hospitals and Medical Insurance companies, your computer is a much bigger hack target than your email service with their support staff and multiple servers and connections.
Here is the bottom line. If you are concerned about someone reading your email, you and your contacts should learn how to use GPG, OTF disk encryption, and use any email service that is reliable. Trusting anyone other than yourself to provide your security is a gamble and is also more likely to make you the focus of the very attention you might not want.
I agree with TenFour. Identity theft by hackers or having your emails held ransom is a much bigger threat for the average person. But I do agree with you WheelDeal that I do not like the idea of a service skimming through my emails to sell my info. So that is why I avoid services who have a prior history of doing that. I have never had that problem with the ones I have written about.
I hope that you can find a good solution for yourself, even if it means buying a domain and setting up your own mail server.
HTH