Emails, government surveillance, and politics

Hey All,

So I'm getting increasingly worried about using my work email. I work in political theory at an R1 in the USA and I'm pretty left though I consider myself to be fair. I teach a lot of Marxist and Critical Race Theory, though again, I'm not ideologically close-minded. I also teach sections about genocide in my courses, which can be politically controversial. I occasionally get haters among students (usually conservatives) but overall I'm a pretty popular professor.

I'm worried that my email will be made public. I know that my work email is not private and though there is nothing that would be overtly damning, I'm sure there's some grumbling about politics and some things that could be used to make me look bad if somebody were so inclined.

I recently had friend have their grant canceled in all of the madness and instead of reaching out to them through my work email, I used my private account because I was afraid of future scrutiny if we communicated over work email.

I guess my question is: what precautionary steps can I and other faculty make to protect their electronic communications? I assume work email is not private and could be exposed but if I use a personal email account is that more private or is that a mistake?

Do you have any rules for email correspondence that you use when discussing controversial issues with students or colleagues?