Why the situation is as it is

E-mail services can be funded in a few ways:

- By making you pay for an account
- By collecting and sharing your data, or showing advertisements
- By paying for it from the maintainers' own pockets
- By soliciting donations

Option 1 can afford to be private without needing your data - however, that does not mean it will. After all, privacy is a big business opportunity now and there are lots of frauds taking advantage (many of them I've analyzed here). Some do exist that do go out of their way to create a secure, private and functional service - so, use those if you've got the money. Option 2 is obviously undesirable and the reason for this report's existence. Option 3 is extremely rare and doesn't last long (see SigaVPN), so let's move on to Option 4:

For a service to earn donations, there need to be people willing to give them. Unfortunately, there are not enough privacy enthusiasts for whom that cause is important enough to support monetarily. There is a group of people who do care more about it, though - the so-called "activists", or people "working on liberatory social change". This means the service will be inseparable from the donators' ideology - since it was made by them, for them, anyway. The activists consider it an abuse that the big corpos or governments can spy on their communication or even track their web browsing to show them ads, etc. More importantly, since they use the Internet to talk about their "activism", they cannot afford to be watched - because that innocent convo might be used against them during protests, etc. Privacy enthusiasts alone usually do not have an ideology they identify with from which the privacy would follow - they just don't like being spied on. They also don't do real-life stuff such as shoplifts, whistleblowing, etc. for which the privacy would be required. We can see, then, why the "activists" care so much more about the issue that they can afford to donate. This is why we don't yet have a service that is free, donation-supported, and without a stated ideology - privacy alone just doesn't move the spirits enough. When the privacy enthusiasts consider the issue more important, these kinds of services will spring up. For now, we're unfortunately dependent on RiseUp, Disroot and some others.