Now the question is: What major options do privacy advocates have apart from hosting their own mailservers?

Even if you host it yourself but at a regular hosting provider "they" might just confiscate your servers. Increasing email encryption usability might be the road out of this dilemma. Otherwise email encryption is going to stay within a very small circle of users.

When I said "Host your own" I meant on a physically secure box using full disk encryption.

But I do like the idea of encryption, GPG does this really well already but key distribution is still a problem.

Just an idea for a secure physical box: Throw in a external "always on" GPS receiver on the box and have it physically destroy the hard drive if it is outside of a certain area or if it detects a certain amount of movement (think someone removing it from a rack without disabling the service first). If your server was moved/confiscated it would ensure some safety. Just a tinfoil thought.

When you say "physically destroy" do not use any form or anything that could be spun as a incinderary, explosive, or projectile device. The laws on those type of things will put you in prison for a long time.

How would one go about safely destroying multiple hard-disks anyway. Closest thing I can think of is a small compactor with the disks inside of it.

You're much better off just using full-disk encryption; throwing away the key effectively destroys all the data. You do need to make sure you actually erase all traces of the key (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cold_boot_att...), but you need not worry about physically destroying the disks.

GPS signals are very weak, and can usually not be received inside a building such as a datacenter.

GPG. It's easy to use and can even easily plug right into Thunderbird and Thunderbird Portable (USB).

gpg

The slow and often fruitfulness process of changing the law.

Probably something like Duck Duck Go, or something.

I've always tried to devote as much time to my work as possible, whenever possible. However my job drained the energy out of me and made any effort I put in become spread out over multiple little projects. The main reason I'm asking this here is because I have a nice amount of time to sit down and work on one little project until completion.

Honestly if I can hold it in my hands and it works in a unconventional way, it's brilliant.

Another poster mentioned GB development, I honestly think controlling external devices (AVR, Arduino, etc) in a standard way using something like a GameBoy would be a worthwhile project.

I've been looking at GB Development fairly closely, might put together some kind of little project in that. Extremely close to the hardware which is always nice and I just need a little flash cart to let it run on my old GBC to show it off. Thanks!