

The one thing you can of course do is to encrypt your messages with PGP or S/MIME.

However, considering that most text-based CAPTCHAs are now fairly easily defeated, nothing you do like this is likely to present any significant obstacle for the likes of google to read if they really want to. Technically speaking, for clean text on a plain background, PNG will look better, OCR better, and probably compress better than JPEG, but if you're out to hide stuff, overcompressed jpeg will make quite a mess and be harder to OCR, but also harder to read.

No matter what you do, when you send an email to a gmail account, they unavoidably know your email address, and from that they can index into their monstrous data reserves and link it up with not only your phone number, but pretty much everything about you, regardless of what you do within your email messages. I think I'd class this as inappropriately paranoid.
