"And the government officials can sell this data to me. Relatively inexpensive too".

Not to mention an XMPP server is lighter than even Conduit, let alone Synapse!

If it is a public groupchat - why not?

What about using a normal, non-Cloudflare VPS for this?

AND there have been news that RCS can be blocked for rooted phones and custom operating systems!

Where I live, a lot of popular services, including major foreign social media and torrents everyone uses, are blocked - yet they still have a massive userbase.

And since the scanning is supposed to be client-side, how would a server check if the scanning was really performed? What if the server does receive and log the needed responses, just to be safe, but the client actually just sends them automatically while lacking such functionality?

If I cared about the contents of email staying safe, would rather not depend on a provider and just use provider-independent PGP. If safety is more important than universality - then I'd use something outside of email in general, like XMPP+OMEMO or maybe Simplex.

Yea, it is clear if there is just one closed-source app. But if we're talking XMPP/Matrix - they have multiple open-source clients, even if some of them does introduce scanning, no way it wouldn't be forked to remove it.

The hardest part is finding a place to buy, especially without KYC. Once you do have Monero, it is VERY easy to use.

Even if this is illegal - how would such usage be detected? Your device just makes a request to a random domain on a random VPS, and the traffic is TLS-encrypted - would usage of XMPP/Matrix/whatever be that distinct?

Yea, my main issue is that because of the price, you're locked to phones that are either out or almost out of support, or secondhand. Even the last generation's cheapest model is $300! Though very tempted to try to save that anyway.

Plus they are not officially sold here, so always a bit of a gamble.

I self-host too, that wasn't the problem, it's that there is the power of the default. Just like with Matrix. You can ask a friend to use your server or another one and delete the main ones entirely, but chances are you won't be avoiding them in a random chatroom.