So I'm just gonna talk from some personal experience here as someone who has had multiple characters killed off in play-by-post RPs. 

I like injury and character death in a lot my RPing. I think it adds stakes and an element of risk to the whole thing, provides opportunities for characters to grow etc. etc. Most of the time, I am more than happy to put the fate of my own characters in the hands of the GM and let them decide how badly injured I am at the end of an encounter. The unpredictability of the whole thing adds a bit of spice to the roleplaying for me. 

However, every time that one of my characters have been killed, it has been at my instigation. I have never had a GM turn around to me and say: "I want to kill your character." It's always been the other way around, me going to my GM and saying: "Hey, I really think we should kill my character."

Why do I do this? Normally its because I think the story calls for it, sometimes that means the story the GM is trying to tell, sometimes that means the story I am trying to tell with the character. At other times I just get tired to a character and want to send them off with something of a memorable bang for the other players. Dramatic deaths are in my experience a helluva lot more fun than slowly losing interest and ghosting people. 

So in answer to your question, I do think the best thing you can hope for is finding a GM and a group of players that want to embrace character death and aren't afraid of treating their characters roughly. Because enforced or coerced character deaths are no where near as amazing as the glorious fuck-yous and tragic swansongs that can be crafted between player and GM when both them are fully there for killing off a character.