Sending an email to another person is not as secure as one would think. When you send an email, your email does not travel directly to the computer of the person that expects the email; it needs to hop through a bunch of other mail and proxy servers until it reaches its destination. During all this hopping from server to server, your email content is visible to everyone that knows a little bit about sniffing the network, but more importantly, Internet companies and mail providers can read the content. Think of it as sending a postcard where everyone with access to the postal system (of your postbox) can read the content of the postcard.
A lot of people claim that they have nothing to hide, which I sympathize with, after all, we haven’t done anything wrong, so why should we hide things? However, that is not the point. The point is that you are having a private conversation with another person and sometimes you don’t want anybody else outside that conversation to know what you talked about. And that is your right to have that sort of privacy. The same goes for email and other digital means of communication, where only you and the destination should be reading the content of your email, not a telecom company, not someone sniffing the network, and definitely not your email provider. For the same reason that you do not give up your favorite social media password to anyone, no one should be able to access and read what is yours.