I went with Posteo and have been happy with it. The only meaningful advantage of Tutanova and Proton that I'm aware of is the encryption, but that only works if the person you're communicating with also uses their service, so I figure what's the point? I've also heard of various problems people have had with with both of them. And, at least at the time I checked, you had to use a browser or electron interface to access them though their own UI. With Posteo I added the account to Thunderbird and I access it through SMTP via TB's mechanisms (e.g. auto-checking every X minutes and popping up a system notification when there's a new email) just like with my other email account.

Food for thought: By consistently following a strategy optimizing and picking the optimal product/service based on cost/benefit, you will end up on the same one as everyone else doing the same thing. From a practical perspective this leads to winner-takes-all and centralization. Whoever is the underdog today becomes the Google or Cloudflare of tomorrow and we're back at square one. From a philosophical perspective, did you really make a choice? Or did "the market" (of which you are also part) decide on your behalf? A healthy market needs at least thousands of mail providers, not 5 or 10.

Obviously same thing goes for basing your pick on brand perception, picking the most popular or recommended one, but without the benefit of knowing you'll actually get the better service.

Can free will exist among economically rational participants in a market? There can be some power in knowing you chose whatever you did based on factors other than cost-performance or popularity. Sometimes the optimal choice can be suboptimal.

And why not self-hosting your inbox? Hard to beat from privacy standpoint. It really doesn't have to be as hard as they say. Even if you don't go full homelab right away: Some providers are accommodating and make it easy to gradually or partially self-host by offering open standard protocols. Others make it really tricky and steer you hard into their app ecosystem. So how straightforward it is to use your own local third-party mail client is a good consideration even if you don't intend to self-host anything else anytime soon.

I went with Tutanota and though I am fine with the service as such, one thing that bugs me is.. Behold... The encryption!

It is pretty safe I guess but limited to other users (of whom I know none) and since they wont let me use pgp as a fallback I am down to preshared passwords. Thats annoying!

Tuta doesn't ask for phone number

Re: Proton

Proton CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party in a post on X, declaring that “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”

https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/

EDIT: However, he donates to Liberal causes, who knows maybe he was signalling to the Trump admin like 95% of businesses