Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Even if you’re not using one of the big providers there’s a good chance they’re going to be at least handing it on its way to your self-hosted inbox, and its contents are unencrypted while they’re handling it (unless you encrypt the contents yourself). So there’s not much benefit to self hosting email if your goal is to keep your data out of big tech’s hands (and if that is your goal, don’t send anything important with email)

I might be out of the loop on how email works, but doesn’t it hop between several other email servers on its way from Alice to Bob (and at least some of it must still be unencrypted)? If so and given google’s scale you could probably just assume that even if they’re not your inbox they’re going to be at least handling many if not most emails along the way.

The data is all there, the vendor they were using to manage the storage just went OOB, and they’re not yet being allowed to retrieve it from the vendor’s storage vendor, Iron Mountain:

The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.