Please don't call people or their statements stupid.

It's not "stupid". Caring that your data is not being used to make opaque decisions in other products that you have no visibility or control over is something that people are allowed to care about.

When it's just an email can be deleted and when it is you don't have to wonder if it's purged from 10 other systems. That it's not showing you is what some people want, regardless of whether you do or not.

> Caring that your data is not being used to make opaque decisions in other products that you have no visibility or control over is something that people are allowed to care about.

Whether a product shows that data or not, it can still make those decisions if it has that data. Both Fastmail and Google have that data. It is certainly naive (if not stupid) to conflate data use with privacy and get suckered into spending money on that confusion. Data collection is what matters for privacy.

Are you advocating that every one take on the operational burden of running an email server after everyone takes on the mental burden of learning how to set up and configure a mail server and all the fiddly DNS bits theirselves?

No. I'm advocating that people understand that there is no difference in privacy between providing your email data to one company or another. They can then make their own decisions from there.