Your email address is too important to leave in the hands of a third-party provider. This isn’t to say that using a third-party provider to run your email is a bad idea. You should own the domain, though.
In addition to size of the data transmission being a poor measure of privacy implications (XML versus JSON anyone?), this paragraph is nonsense: "The University of Dublin professor says that this expansive data collection raises at least two major concerns. First, that the telemetry can be used to link physical devices to personal details, data that both companies are most likely exploiting for advertising purposes."
Apple doesn't have an advertising business, nor does it share that information with advertisers.
Take a look at _Robustify Your Links_.[1] It is an API and a snippet of JavaScript that saves your target HREF in one of the web archiving services and adds a decorator to the link display that offers the option to the user to view the web archive.