The company to whom I'm currently contracted has a 2-month retention policy on inboxes and it drives me crazy.
Are they engaged in generally questionable behavior? Otherwise I can’t imagine why they’d have such a short retention policy.
No, and it can be worked around by copying emails to folders, it's just annoying.
Apple is secretive not sneaky they aren’t trying to trick anybody. They are working on human centric computing. They have had human interface guidelines and the preservation of those guidelines is maintained through app review.
I’m sure that some form of side loading will appear soon. My guess is that all the privacy and integration will be held at arms length from the rest of the ecosystem and may just use webkit to access the user data.
Apple chose to keep these emails around because the value of the emails was greater than the risk of keeping them.