You probably couldn't resist intrusion if you were under an active investigation, but hosting your own mail server would certainly help to partially mitigate the mass surveillance dragnets that are logging all traffic en masse from popular mail providers.
On the one hand your argument makes a lot of sense to me, but on the other hand using an email provider that is not one of the popular ones might in itself make you seem more suspicious.
And intercepting your email correspondence, no matter the provider, might be so trivial to the intelligence agencies at this point that they might be doing so already anyways. It's not unlikely that they'd be 'scanning' Fastmail email more intently than gmail, precisely because of the kinds of people that have security concerns.
> "... using an email provider that is not one of the popular ones might in itself make you seem more suspicious."
This kind of thinking is dangerous and scares me more than the dragnets themselves. There should be nothing suspicious about a citizen exercising their ability to choose from providers. As an analogy, I find it on par with thinking that hippies/minorities/whatever are somehow subversive just because they don't fit your idea of normal.
I can understand that this kind of thinking scares you, because it scares me too. I don't want to live in a world where hippies are monitored because they deviate from the norm, and I don't want to live in a world where trying to protect your privacy in itself can make you suspicious.
And yet hippies were monitored, and yet it's plausible that protecting your privacy does make you suspicious.
So I understand that this is scary, but I don't really understand why you consider this kind of thinking dangerous. If it's true, or if there's a good chance that it's true, then shouldn't that knowledge be acted upon, or at least considered, however scary?
Or am I misunderstanding you and are you just stating that in general you hate this situation?
Paying for email service might be a good idea for a lot of reasons, but people have an extremely absurd sense that they're "fighting the man". You know - by paying in US dollars, to a US company, using US banks....
EDIT: Something I did just see is that Fastmail gives you sieve scripting. Since going from hosting my own inbound email to Gmail, I've really missed having a good email sorting language.
I'm answering the specific points made about FastMail with the whether they are correct or not.
We don't have an account with a US bank, though we do have an account in USD, and we're an Australian company, not a US company.
Other than that, our main datacentre is in the USA, and obviously if every US bank decided not to allow transactions to our accounts, we would be in trouble. That would be true regardless of whether we billed in USD or AUD.
Same here, I think Fastmail should definitely consider hosting their servers in various locations and allow their customers to choose where they want their primary storage to be.
