[roughly]

> "we have access to the following email metadata: sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times"

Is there any of that that’s not basically required by the fact that they’re running an _email_ service?

[esdf]

Sure, for sending/receiving the email all of that is accessible/needed but some (all, even) of this could be stored encrypted by the user's password/mailbox-password.

If I remember correctly: one of the reasons they don't encrypt that metadata is so they can do the search box server-side.