Depends, if you're able to poison the DNS of the mailprovider / hack the recipient mailserver or do a phising attack.

I just want to be able to communicate without sharing my phone number (since my phone number is bound to Swedish "Swish") meaning someone can get my ID from my phone number here.

This is why drug dealers use Wickr, Threema and others, because they don't expose identity, not because they're "safer".

I have a contact on Threema who I've met many times, but I have no idea how to contact him outside of Threema, because I don't know his identity and we'd both like to keep it that way.

"security" is vast and means different things to different people.

Email can absolutely be used for with e2e encryption keeping the content of exchanges from external eyes.

Email can absolutely not be used for hiding metadata of who talks to who.

You can trivially create as many emails as you want, anonymously and for free.

In many countries, registering phone numbers anonymously is illegal and/or impossible.

> You can trivially create as many emails as you want, anonymously and for free.

Where? Gmail and hotmail both don't allow this.

I agree with you on this one. the person you are replying too is correct in that it does not matter how much you learn or teach yourself, getting a new number is far from trivial, whereas with getting a new anonymous email account, if you take the time to learn, it is trivial, depending on what you care about.

Do you just care about making burner anonymous emails that just work all the time? There are vendors that you can pay for that service (my go to is protonmail), and there are free options out there as well (my go to is riseup). The problem is finding the vendor that suits your need, since these are niche services for the most part.

If you care more about the privacy / sovereignty side of things, you can set up your own mailserver, and once thats done, its incredibly trivial to spin up new burner emails. But that's an even bigger knowledge gap, to the point where its fairly common even on tech forums like HN for folks to be like "Self host email? nope thats to hard".

So yeah, I agree. This is not really an option for an average user. But in the context of signal, I think it makes perfect sense to allow it as an option, even if its not the default.