Privacy

I feel like every email post is a "don't use platform x" and there are very few (if any?) universally well received services out there. In which case the community will probably just give up and go back to Google.

We probably need a tier chart or something to add perspective. Proton have made dumb decisions recently but they're still better than Google/Microsoft

I've been using Posteo for years and don't have any complaints.

I use GPG in Thunderbird with ForwardEmail (because I use a custom domain)

I self host my mail. There are plenty of people telling you not to do so, but I sincerely have made very good experience with it the last 10 years. The absolute minimum you should do is to have your own domain, otherwise you are in a vendor lockin.

Then, use PGP where possible with an open source mail client such as thunderbird.

self host. you can get great deals on domains and have whatever you want. Hell in many cases you can get free domains with hosting. my domain is a .ca (i'm Canadian) and I got it free for 2 years with a hosting plan that costs me $50 a year. So I'm already saving over Proton, It's local to me, and I can have unlimited accounts and bandwidth. I also use it to host my portfolio site.

Then I also have my own home server which I use for VPN, Backups, Bitwarden, Git Repos, torrents/media, even have my own searx search engine on it.