No. It matters because courts have ruled that your system cannot claim "averting its eyes" as a defense against providing intercepted data.
Recent (in the past year) court rulings have decided that passwords in memory are accessible, even if your softwre normally throws them away -- so you could be legally compelled to implement interception of those. (IANAL, and this assumes that I understood the things others wrote about these...) Sure, it's likely only in some circuits, but I'd be surprised if other judges did not rule similarly.
A safer system would be where YOU create your own key pair, and only send your public key to the secure mail provider. You know that your e-mail, your text, etc is never in cleartext on the remote system, which means that even if that system is completely compromised, all an attacker is getting is encrypted copies of your communications. (Well, and cleartext metadata, since you need that for sending mail.)
In such a system, you know that encryption is happening, because you are doing it on your computer before sending bits to the server. (You'd also need a way to exchange keys in a way which doesn't require trusting the secure server not to be MITM-ing you.)
Even that's likely not fully safe, but it's very different from having the server avert its eyes and pretend you never sent it plaintext keys/credentials.
> you know that encryption is happening, because you are doing it on your computer before sending bits to the server
If your server receives email for you over SMTP, you are trusting the server not to log a copy before encrypting, trusting that there is no intruder on the server, trusting that someone (like the NSA) is not logging traffic between servers, and trusting the sender's machines to the same.
Similarly when you send email in a way that can be read by your recipient's provider. You have to encrypt for an individual, as with PGP, for there to be meaningful security, at which point your provider's "secure" practices are only covering a bit of metadata, some of which will be leaked when communicating the message.
The problem with PGP is that it has a complicated trust model, poor client integration, and does not provide forward secrecy. The first two may be fixable via better user interfaces (which includes breaking from traditional webmail) but forward secrecy would need protocol support is in conflict with the asynchrony email currently enjoys.
Recent (in the past year) court rulings have decided that passwords in memory are accessible, even if your softwre normally throws them away -- so you could be legally compelled to implement interception of those. (IANAL, and this assumes that I understood the things others wrote about these...) Sure, it's likely only in some circuits, but I'd be surprised if other judges did not rule similarly.
A safer system would be where YOU create your own key pair, and only send your public key to the secure mail provider. You know that your e-mail, your text, etc is never in cleartext on the remote system, which means that even if that system is completely compromised, all an attacker is getting is encrypted copies of your communications. (Well, and cleartext metadata, since you need that for sending mail.)
In such a system, you know that encryption is happening, because you are doing it on your computer before sending bits to the server. (You'd also need a way to exchange keys in a way which doesn't require trusting the secure server not to be MITM-ing you.)
Even that's likely not fully safe, but it's very different from having the server avert its eyes and pretend you never sent it plaintext keys/credentials.