University Email Question

I'm a professor at a large university and I'm hearing stories about emails being made public in relations to employee misconduct. I got this email a long time ago and it wound up being used by different groups that are not work related (probably because it shows up on my google search so people find it and add it to their mailing list). I have no misconduct concerns, but I don't want people going through my emails for one reason or another.

Does a .edu email account have any privacy attached to it? Could they all be subject to a FOIA request? Would FERPA protect any of it? If I stopped using it and went to a gmail account for all email (including work), would that give me any protections? I suspect that that's a bad idea, but does anybody have thoughts about it?