Sure! Signal and WhatsApp are good at having private conversations. Email is very tough to add private conversation capability to, for a variety of reasons. What you do need your mail provider (and by extension your DNS provider) to do is to not give up access to an attacker who asks nicely, because for most services, email access is account takeover.

This makes discussions about email security confusing, because most security professionals I know are thinking about a very different threat model (pop all of your services) than what a lot of people think about (confidentiality). Google is pretty good at not letting random people auth to GSuite as you. (Still turn off SMS recovery, though.)

Does that answer your question?

I get the impression that when non-security people talk about "security" these days it's almost always in the context of preventing government surveillance.

So even though Google has a great track record of keeping hackers from taking over your accounts, the news stories about them cooperating with governments makes them seem less "secure" to some people.

What's weird is when it leads to a fallacy where people trust services that are less verified and tested in terms of security just because there isn't the association with government cooperation.

This is irrational. It might be a complicated question if the foreign-jurisdiction alternatives were more secure, rather than drastically less secure. But since that's not the case, switching from Google Mail actually gets you the worst of both worlds: a mail service that is materially less secure, operating in a jurisdiction where there are literally no rules preventing USG-level adversaries from exploiting it.

Agreed. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes, thanks for the clarification on that point. Cheers.