Mods of communities can already see votes in communities they moderate. Admins of instances can already see votes on all content.

This has nothing to do with email as a protocol. The court order discussed in the article asked for the recovery email address of an account. No actual email data was transferred.

It’s perfectly normal for your computer to have daemons.

You should definitely set up a DMARC record to prevent other people from using your email domain to send spam. If you don’t have DMARC configured, other email servers will give any senders the benefit of the doubt and accept mail that claims to be from your domain.

You can just set the DMARC record to reject 100% of unverified mail and call it a day. Since you aren’t sending anything it won’t affect you.

These ads only appear in the “promotions” section of Gmail, the section that is by definition for advertising emails. It’s not great, but this is the least intrusive place to put ads.