Strong maybe at best. If you can find a complete mail app on MacPorts-- you cannot simply install some newer library, you must install the entire application-- then by all means try it.
You're looking at the scope wrong. Hackers don't want your PPC, they want your email, and if they get that, you're hosed.
This suggests the ongoing battle between hackers/crackers and SaaS providers like Google lies not so much where the email data might live, but in the disruption of delivery provision for that email data itself — i.e., MitM access (or authentication-spoofing) to email data stored on the SaaS cloud server and accessed by the end user on an as-requested basis.
I think back to the model of retrieving mail locally and keeping that locally, deleting at the server. This, of course, means being confined to access that email at one node — the client system storing that email data. The trade-off is one cannot use any device they possess to view email anywhere, anytime. The problem here, however unwieldy, is the expectation of accessing email data anywhere, anytime, comes with a lot of high-complexity authentication measures (2FA, crypto key, biometrics, etc.) to maintain that convenience.
Yet as this was never a “convenience” feature at the inception of email, or for the generations of folks to have used email before the rise of web mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Lycos Mail, and Gmail, our general vulnerability in the decades since fell to the temporary delivery of requested email, as served by a database-driven web portal. Prior to, the vulnerability fell almost entirely (at least after SSL/TLS-based) one-time encryption of delivering that email data to a destination, leaving the vulnerability to the end user’s management and security for their own device (as well as, well, backing it up faithfully).
Hackers/crackers now need not worry about drilling into an end user’s device so much as drilling into the medium between server and end user (or, more accurately, “product”). This is a trade-off the tech sector made
for the end user, whether or not the end user/product requested it.
tl;dr: It didn’t have to be this way.
Leaving legacy implementations is always a security risk, and it's always a tradeoff between security and convenience. Outlook and Gmail are the two largest email platforms, and believe me when I say that it is always a cat-and-mouse game between their security team and malicious actors.
Removing legacy or oft-unused features also reduces the platform's attack surface, which is automatically more secure by default no matter how public perception is. At some point, upkeep of these legacy features becomes a maintenance nightmare and when they do they will be discarded.
Unless you feel like moving your mail operations to a service that still has these legacy features, your options are getting more and more slim by the day. We are the 0.1%, it is up to us to create solutions and workarounds. The moment the last developer, tinkerer, or maintainer leaves, that's it, it's over, time to move on.
Or, however unusual it might seem, any personal or business budgeting for, say, Google premium cloud services could instead go toward an independent web hosting provider, in which email can be handled by an application.
Horde groupware comes to mind. Email is delivered, via POP3/IMAP encryption, to a destination, where it is stored by the end-user at destination and either deleted or saved upstream, but not a
requirement to need to always have that email data stored on the cloud (and accessible only on an as-needed basis through encryption techniques which, once cracked, renders the entire delivery system prone to exploits).
I often ponder the question, “Did we really ever
need our digital lives on the cloud to work within a digital realm, or were we steered that direction by a model of business designed to exploit the end user as a product?” This is such an example, one I had to re-visit the moment I could no longer access a couple of my lesser-used Gmail accounts I’d held since 2004–05. Fortunately, for all email received prior to that last successful login, I still have all that email data locally (and backed up along with other local data).
Without that, years of my email data would have been permanently inaccessible, forever, all due to an unrequested change in service protocols as a fix to other cloud-oriented security kludges, all because someone in Silly Valley concluded we must have our personal data on the cloud and accessible from anywhere, on any device, for —
::flails arms in the air like a Muppet:: —
reasons. 😤
