[confounded]

You make an excellent point, but I’d say the bigger problem with Gmail from a privacy stand-point is that your contacts and email contents are surrendered to an ad-surveillance company, and deliberately stored in plain-text, for any international government that fancies a look.

Even if you accept that that’s a price worth paying for the service, you’re “snitching” on all your friends you exchange numbers/emails with. If you avoid Gmail, they still have all your email, just from the other end.

[TheReveller]

How do you know they are stored in plain text?

[gruez]

it any better if it's encrypted, but google holds the keys? it's obviously not e2e encrypted (otherwise IMAP access won't work)

[hartator]

If they scan it for ads, spam, and search, it has to be plain text.