I don't think the OP is saying to switch to gmail. They're saying if you think switching from gmail is hard, just wait until you have to pay to forward all of your email if you need to move away from Proton mail if they end up being as bad as Google. They're saying use something else that's neither gmail nor proton mail.

The details might be technically correct but then the title is rage bait.

Maybe I'm missing something, do you often communicate via email to your bank?

I know I do not. Pretty much never ever. That being said if I were to have to, rather than via their website or phone call, I can update that data on my bank account. I'm sure I must go through few (security) hoops to do it but I doubt it takes me more than 5min. In such case... I would put whatever email and I need to switch because I don't want to pay for that domain anymore then I would just update my contact information there.

TL;DR: I also use my own domain name for banking but in my case I'd argue it doesn't matter much.

I have selfhosted my mail on my own domain, on a server in my closet, for about 4 years. In that time I never switched over realy important things, like government etc, out of fear of missing an email and not knowing. That was the only reason not to switch for me. I've had to move a few times in a short peroid and my career started taking more of my time, so I have less time to manage the server, thus I started looking around. Now I settled on proton, I don't use any of their domains, only my own, and I've switched literally everything over, except for the recovery mail for my domain registrar login. Since proton hosts professionally, I trust them not to drop mails without telling me, and I don't realy see a reason not to switch over. If I ever want to move provider, or start selfhosting again, I'll setup the new provider, update the dns for my domain and done.

If you have some specific questions about my setup or choices, let me know, although I'm probably not able to reply in the next 12ish hours.

i couldn't set it up and it went a little beyond my understanding why, but apparently it's a paid feature. i don't necessarily love thubderbird either, but it does its job for me

Yes there is it's called procrastination

The straw that broke the camel's back for me is the CEO's icky tweet about how great Republicans are for your privacy and how they stand up for the little guys (what), which they doubled down on using the official Reddit Proton account. There's already been a ton of discussion about this on the internet if you care to look for more angles on it.

But before that I'd already grown quite leery of them for their trend of endlessly starting new services before the old ones are polished, along with trying to push everyone into their walled garden and endlessly using naggy popups in the UI about it. Worst of all, they have a clear trend of not giving a damn about Linux support, sometimes giving up on certain features for their Linux clients or releasing the clients way after the Windows/Mac versions. For a "privacy company", not putting Linux as a first-class citizen is really just unacceptable, and they've been around for long enough that it's clearly a trend and not a fluke. To me, Proton just feels like a wannabe version of Apple. Its continued actions give me the feeling that it exists to serve itself, not its users.

This is pretty cool and definitely has use, but IIUC this is strictly a free forwarding address, right? I don't think it tries to compete with Proton Mail or Tuta Mail.

Thank you! Great answer!

For some reason, perhaps because I'm an absolute shill/sucker for free services, I always forget about mailbox.org. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and talking about its features!

Though, if I understand correctly, we basically don't have a privacy-respecting email provider that offers auto-forward and auto-reply functionality in its free plan/tier:

• Proton Mail requires a paid plan for auto-forwarding/replying and its free plan doesn't support IMAP. BUT?!, crucially, IIUC, the issue can already be circumvented with a custom domain that sits in front of Proton Mail. Which, isn't entirely free, but 1$ for the domain ain't bad.
• Tuta Mail doesn't even offer the functionality AFAIK nor does it support IMAP. Furthermore, I don't know if the custom domain trick works for this one.
• Finally, mailbox.org doesn't even have a free plan. Though, at 1 euro/month, it's at least very competitively priced.

I have mailbox.org for a side project and although it works well, I don't really like the experience since several parts of the site default to German instead of my own language.