Does that really change much in reality?

If you expect your emails to be inaccessible to anyone except you and the recipient you'll have to encrypt them anyway. If you are worried about the data-mining for ad purposes on other providers switching to a paid provider like Fastmail is still a good option and while everyone is subject to ad-tech data mining not everyone is subject to a targeted collection by a government actor most of the time.

My threat model is: governments can read my email but that will incur a cost, a timelapse and a judge -- not just a point and click mega-spy interface.

I want to bash Trump's latest haircut without fear of incoming, frivolous litigation.

I do, however, expect consequences if I do something really stupid.

I'm in France, and use email mostly to keep up with newsletters, personal comms, and non-important professional comms. If your threat model includes the Australian Government as a threat, then yes, using another provider would make sense. Then again, if you have government agencies in your threat model, you might want to move to E2E communications anyways.

This is terrible, I'm [genuinly] surprised that other people recommend fastmail.

I don't think the blog post is accurate, see [1]. From the three providers mentioned above (fastmail/mailbox/runbox) which I have experience with, fastmail has by far the best ui, speed and feel (atm).

As with gmail the fastmail provider does read your email content to provide e.g. search (and in case of gmail who knows what more?). Both will hand out information with a lawful warrant. -- And as long as the government is reasonably sane [2] that's perfectly fine with me.

[1] https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi... [2] otherwise I'd try ProtonMail (but it has a price in useability)

Government interception is not part of my threat model for email. Emails may relayed through intermediate servers I can't control and may or may not be encrypted in transit or storage along the way. If I want private communication I'm not going to use email (or probably the internet).

However a service not randomly shutting down or dropping support for open protocols _is_ part of my requirements for an email host.