Tl;dr: deliver snail-mail by hand

Most corporations and gov agencies have outsourced email service to a highly unethical corporation (Microsoft). Every time you send an email to a recipient who uses MS for email service, you feed profitable data to a surveillance advertiser who snoops on email payloads for profit. You also reveal to the recipient your email address which they can use to feed profitable data to the surveillance advertiser beyond your control for an indefinite time.

It’s baffling how many people think this is a good idea.

As a Microsoft boycotter, I have naturally reverted back to old-fashioned snail mail. If the recipient is in my city, I personally hand-deliver the letter to their mailbox. Costs me nearly nothing. The recipient who is typically a gov agency or corporation is generally forced to respond using the national postal service (as I withhold email addresses from the correspondence). And rightfully so. It’s an extra perk that they pay a built-in postage penalty for poorly choosing their email provider.

This has been working well for me¹. I spend nothing if the recipient is in cycling range, and the recipient helps fund the national postal service when they respond using an option that is increasingly under the threat of mass digitization by privacy adversaries (MS and Google). Case in point: Denmark ends postal service this year, so it’s already too late there.

To verify whether the recipient’s email traverses a surveillance advertiser:

torsocks dig @8.20.247.20 -t mx -q "$domain" +noclass +nocomments +nostats +short +tcp +nosearch

where $domain is the domain portion of their email address. This command will check whether their vanity address is Microsoft or Google in disguise – which is usually the case. It will usually output “yada yada outlook yada yada” to indicate Microsoft.

If you live remotely, can’t cycle, etc, then stop being cheap and buy stamps. They are cheaper than your Internet subscription which leaves you feeding surveillance advertisers.

¹ Exceptionally, one recipient went to the trouble of collecting my email address from a 3rd party without my consent in order to respond to my snail mail via email hosted by their surveillance advertiser. They naturally received an instant GDPR Article 17 request to erase my email address at that point along with a notice that they violated Article 5 (data minimisation).