So according to a few sources Yahoo Mail are updating their Terms and Services which will allow them to scan all of your Emails and even though they say it's optional, i don't really trust them.

Anyway as i use yahoo mail quite a bit i want to change now to a more secure one so my question is what site do you use for your main emails and such and how secure is it compared to the rest of them?

Your own email hosted on dedicated server?

You can't say "my e-mail is safe and secure" on any free email company. Because they all may change their ToS whenever they want.

So i can't recommend you google mail either. Because you know what google is :P

try this site:
http://email.about.com/od/freeemailreviews/tp/free_email.htm

Unless you're some kind of Scandinavian anti-establishment Marxist terrorist (in which case, welcome to gog), or store sensitive data in your mail folder, there's no need to feel scared by this move from yahoo. Google scans your incoming mails for their spam filters, so why not yahoo?

If the server is collocated with some data-centre, you might find that their support has access to your data.
If you're somehow running a server in your house/company the data reaching the server still takes it's way through the upstream and downstream provider at best (considering an unlikely single hop scenario) and normally passes various routers.

If you want a secure scenario, encode data. That way it doesn't matter where it is stored, or who could take a glimpse. Not that there would be a 100% secure encryption, but there's a point when the effort to read your personal mail outweighs the benefit by far.

And yes, I'm aware that this is highly 'tin foil paranoia' and won't work with any third party unwilling to encode data :p I pledge innocent though, as I'm waiting for a download to finish and am typing this to have an excuse not to work on this lame project ;)

Yahoo will probably scan emails for ADVERTISING. Programs scanning emails are used to find out what's most interesting for you, not for protection.

Well, they can scan my mail any time they want. For them knowing that I buy at zavvi, GOG and Steam, which represents about 99.9% of my mails is hardly paranoia inducing. ;)

Personally, I just don't like advertising I haven't order :P

If they'd spam me with free gift codes for GOG or Steam, they can drop all the 'advertisement' they want in my inbox *winks*.

Keep on dreamin' ;P

I use yahoo. Since it is a free quality service, I do not mind email scanning to make ad decisions. If it is "free" internet, ads are expected. I know they aren't abusing my PI so I don't care.

They don't, but CIA does, hahaha. And ECHELON, don't forget about that :P

The CIA has my info, why would they need to scan my emails?

*slides illegal porn out of sight*

This.

imap server, smtp server, web server, php, database server, and to top it all off: roundcube webmail, seriously, that thing owns all other webmail solutions that I've tried by miles (both "cloud" and self-hosted).

The only things I miss are contacts sync to various devices/clients and automatic mail filtering. Instead my mail clients have to do the filtering, which gets messy when I try to keep the filters in sync through a dozen clients on half as many computers; and I use Google for my contacts until I can find a half-decent homebrew solution.

Out of curiosity, how much do you pay for the server (be it dedicated or virtual)?

Dudes, I've been with Yahoo since 1999...They are like my mama...Don't be sassin my mama! ;p