"Privacy friendly" is more than a binary "has end-to-end encryption or not" when it comes to e-mail, especially given the issues laid out in the quoted document (which the quora answer then dismisses, arguably not having understood the basis for them or at least not properly establishing why they think it still provides a benefit). In nearly all cases you have to trust your provider in the end, so the more important question is "which organization do I trust the most".

It's a good point.

As an Aussie who vaguely follows Aussie politics. I know that at the very least the current ruling party has some pretty funny ideas about internet privacy [1][2]. So it kinda scares me that Fastmail is based there.

That said, I'm currently using Fastmail since switching to it from Gmail a few months ago. The service itself is excellent. As far as I can tell, they don't seem to actively scan the contents of your email to build a profile on you like Google does [3]. So, at least for now, there's that.

[1]: https://www.cyberscoop.com/australia-encryption-backdoors-la... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral... [3]: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html#sharing