artifex

There are some smart, evil ones too.

Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Even if you’re not using one of the big providers there’s a good chance they’re going to be at least handing it on its way to your self-hosted inbox, and its contents are unencrypted while they’re handling it (unless you encrypt the contents yourself). So there’s not much benefit to self hosting email if your goal is to keep your data out of big tech’s hands (and if that is your goal, don’t send anything important with email)

I might be out of the loop on how email works, but doesn’t it hop between several other email servers on its way from Alice to Bob (and at least some of it must still be unencrypted)? If so and given google’s scale you could probably just assume that even if they’re not your inbox they’re going to be at least handling many if not most emails along the way.