If you care about e-mail privacy, you should consider desktop/native e-mail clients instead of webmail and IMAP.
Having all your mail sitting on someone else's server means it can be handed over by that company in response to a government request, legal or otherwise. After 6 months, it's not even a fourth amendment issue and no warrant is required; it's not "your" mail when it's data on someone else's server.
This doesn't require technical prowess the average person doesn't have. You can use your ISP's mail server, or a professional service like Rackspace Mail. There are free native e-mail clients for every desktop and mobile platform. You can still get instant mail notifications with IMAP Push. Just set at least one of your computers to delete mail from the server after downloading it.
Having all your mail sitting on someone else's server means it can be handed over by that company in response to a government request, legal or otherwise. After 6 months, it's not even a fourth amendment issue and no warrant is required; it's not "your" mail when it's data on someone else's server.
This doesn't require technical prowess the average person doesn't have. You can use your ISP's mail server, or a professional service like Rackspace Mail. There are free native e-mail clients for every desktop and mobile platform. You can still get instant mail notifications with IMAP Push. Just set at least one of your computers to delete mail from the server after downloading it.