I checked some email providers out last night
and most said privacy included monitoring
activity for marketing purposes, compliance
with federal laws when asked for information,
and in other cases info would be provided based
upon review of the specifics by the email provider.
In no case would info be released to the general
public or based upon requests without legal
background and as provided in the terms of service.
Different wording says basically the same thing. Some
say monitoring also keeps the service smoothly running
and should guard against illegal usage of the email service.
So they do give info to others other than legal requests by law
enforcement at their discretion. Could be worse than a
cloud service run by a bunch of kooks.