TidBITS: You Can’t Escape Gmail.
Do you avoid Gmail due to privacy concerns? Your resistance is futile. Benjamin Mako Hill has hosted his own email for the past 15 years, and despite that, he found that over half of his email messages either come from or go to a Gmail account, where they can be analyzed by the search giant’s automated algorithms. Of course, the same is roughly true of other large mail hosting firms, so although the mail you send isn’t likely to allow these companies to target ads at you better, it’s far from being a private communication between you and the recipient.