Another thing that could be effecting that is if you have Show Read Posts disabled in your user settings. That might explain why the number of posts went down.
I understand that if you are the first to subscribe to the community it will only pull down recent posts. Older posts may get synced later if there are new comments.
I’m only just learning Lemmy though, so hopefully someone with more experience can chime in.
Thanks for all of your effort. Even though we are on different instances, it’s important for the Fediverse community that you succeed. You are doing valuable work, and I appreciate it.
It’s not very open-sourcey, but Apple include a email forwarding service called Hide My Email in their iCloud+ plans. So, you may already have access to that service.
Excellent!