what E-Mail provider do you use and why

I use Protonmail as they offer quite a bit of privacy, offer lots of features, and are free. I particularly like that they protect from tracking pixels notifying the sender you read their email.

mailbox.org is quite good. I prefer them over protonmail because I want to use my own client. If you don't care about using a web UI, use protonmail, otherwise use mailbox.org. you can also take a look at tutanota

Posteo.de - 100% renewable energy. Full industry standard encryption. No tracking, no adds. Annual transparency report. Supporting social and environmental efforts. Great treatment of their employees.

Is self hosting a valid answer?

I host my own email.

Proton (free - 1GB storage, 500MB before doing 4 "tasks") for family, friends, and business types uses, although I'd rather have an integrated calendar (instead of it being a separate app).

Tutanota (free - 1GB storage) for bills, purchases, etc., basically everything else, because I'm never going to say "my email is xxxxx@TUTAmail.com" to anyone I know, especially business acquaintances. So far, I like Tutanota more than Proton, especially the integrated calendar, but that name...... sounds like something my mother or grandparents were scammed into using.

On desktop, I'm currently using Thunderbird (TB) for a couple of older gmail accounts (in the process of transitioning away from), although I hate the recent update to TB. Haven't tried the Tutanota desktop app yet, but web version of email & calendar work adequately. Maybe I'll transition from TB now, after their recent changes.

Considered mailbox.org, but I'm not going to pay for it (no free version), especially when they don't at least have a cell app. Skiff may be worth looking at. Can't recall why I didn't try them.

EDIT: I've now installed Skiff (free - 10GB) as well and liking it so far. Using webmail seems easy and straight forward, cell app looks about the same (but haven't spent too much time on it yet). REALLY like that you basically get 4 email accounts (1 main and 3 alias account names), which is different than Tutanota and Proton. With the different aliases, this gives me an option to use Skiff for everything (if I choose to "put everything in one basket" at some point). Skiff sounds a little better than "Tuta" for business acquaintances as well, but not by much. No integrated calendar, but significantly larger storage is a plus.

I use Fastmail - not too expensive, really good webmail client, has working shared calendar that isn't OWA, and isn't advertising scraping my e-mail. I would have liked a more private service, but back when I moved from self hosted to a service, that was about the best I could get that also had calendaring.

Any email with cock in the name will trigger filtering. It also has the side effect of making me unemployable

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I use protonmail, simplelogin (for email aliases) and tutanota.

I tried Proton, even paid for a year. But hot damn the Android app is garbage. So I've moved to Fastmail and I like it a lot. The app is snappy and I love that it has calendar, contacts, mail, notes, and files storage all in the same app. I used a custom domain with Proton so wasn't hard to switch to a different provider. Just wish I would've known how bad the mobile app was before I plunked down the money.

Protonmail, but not really because of encryption. I just liked their Android client and webmail the most. I've had sensitive backups on Proton Drive for a long time, so that also played a role in the choice.

I hosted my own server for quite a few years, but the SMTP clients (Thunderbird, Evolution, K9 mail) all doing things slightly differently made me give up. Biggest push was that K9 mail didn't really move deleted mail to trash. These were probably dovecot configuration issues, but I got tired of searching for solutions. Never had any deliverability issues.

This one isn't for daily private use, more like a throwaway email service for when sites and services have no earthly business asking your email other than to track you and send junk mail...

dispostable.com

Edit: You don't even have to register an account with them, just make up an email with them and it should just work for most sites.

I use irrelevant at dispostable dot com to use Walmart's free WiFi, the password on Walmart's side is Walmart1 hahahaha!

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Purely mail.

$10/year.

Every provider out there encrypts mail at rest. You're exchanging emails with Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail anyway. Pretending like your email is any safer with Proton or clones is a waste of money imho.

Tutanota. I used to use Proton, but they don’t encrypt folder names, which is a deal breaker. Tutanota does, and they’re also a privacy respecting, reputable, decent service.

Personally on Gmail, but been planning the switch to Fastmail for some time.

I'm willing to pay the $50/year ($4/month) for their 30GB plan to get my email out of Google's hands.

I particularly have concerns over Google deciding to lock out my whole account over something stupid, like keeping ebooks I've purchased in my drive for easy access on all my devices (though maybe that is a symptom of using them for storage as well), or some other arbitrary reason, and losing access to all my accounts elsewhere all over the internet.

Much rather have an email at a custom domain I have ownership over, so no one can ever keep me from using the email address.

From all I hear from IT professionals about it not being worth it even for them to run their own email servers, I'm willing to pay a company for that, and the privacy that comes along with a professional business-client relationship.

I use runbox. It costs money, but is affordable. They also take privacy and security seriously, and they take steps to help the environment when possible.

I'm in the process of migrating to Proton from Gmail and Outlook. All 4 mailboxes imported, now just the tedious job of updating credentials on all the websites remains...

any competently run service that gets you away from the tech conglomerates will work

fuck proton mail, bring your own encryption

I've been using ProtonMail for a while now and it works very well, they also offer a drive, calendar, password manager, VPN; you can choose if you want all the features or just email.

I also tried Tutanota and they do a good job as well, they're a smaller company and don't have as many features as Proton but if all you need is reliable, private e-mail, it's a good option.

For privacy, I believe Proton Mail https://proton.me/mail has been the standard.

I use Tutanota I think it's a really good private email client.

Haven't seen his answer here yet, but I use Zoho. It has a free tier IIRC and supports custom domain.

Not sure how private it is, tho.

Disroot. I also have accounts at Murena and Evilmail if I need to send emails without showing disroot address.

I use forearders to register at websites. DDG for shit, Anonaddy for more important things.

I believe Mailbox and Posteo are also good services. Proton, Tutanota and Skiff are not good.

Selfhosted mail-in-a-box solution. Easy to maintain and configure.

• It just works

I switched to hosting my own inbound mail. I mostly switched because after trying a few providers they almost all dropped some email that I wanted (not Spam, completely dropped) so I set up my own. It is quite nice to have full control over configuration, filtering, backups and whatever else.

Right now I am using a paid rely to send, but maybe I'll see how my IP's reputation at some point.

Paid Proton Mail with my own domain name and own PGP keypair. Although it now has a way to securely search mail, I use the bridge service to allow Betterbird mail to sync my mail to my PC for searching.

For the Proton people. I learnt about a guy that ended up in a US court and they asked proton for all his emails and the handed them right away, no questions asked.

ProtonMail because they're at the very least non-intrusive and don't have a track record of snooping through emails, google im looking at you mf

Migadu they are super affordable. Great service. Privacy focused.

I never knew about cock.li bit it looks really nice. I'm going to try and sign up when they open to the public in November. They have a lot of nice domains too.

I use disroot.

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Honestly, gmail for bills and that kinds of stuff. iCloud for personal stuff. I do not really use email that much other than getting spam. I imagine that is true for most people. I do not understand why the privacy community is so obsessed with private email. Are you really using it for stuff that needs to be so private?

proton's honestly a great deal if you're gonna use the VPN and Password managers. nice easy drop-in replacement for Gmail imo, not much point putting a ton of effort into it since email is inherently insecure

iCloud Mail. I have a Proton account, but the app takes several seconds to load and show me my messages on my phone and I hate the delay. Plus, as of iOS 17, Mail now autofills email verification codes and delete the email afterwards. Plus Mail is built into Siri and all that jazz, so it sometimes shows possible events that I can add to the calendar. So convenient.

If I remember correctly cock.li is also hosting some really bad Nazi domains and has apparently no problem with that...

I'm oldschool.

I've had my own domains and mail servers for the past 3 decades and will maintain them for as long as I live.

And these days, all but the storage runs of Pi3, so it's barely using any power either.

I could invite you.

gmail, protonmail and tutanota also i will eventually get a posteo.de account

Dealers choice on emails imo. Doesn't really matter because you can't verify that they aren't scanning your emails for advertising.

Gmail actually isn't too bad if you use an email forwarder like simple login that kets you pgp encrypt your mail before it gets to google.

gmail because i love google!! nothing to hide, right?

edit: /s

Honestly I just use Outlook. There's no such thing as truly private email so I figured it'd be easier to use a common one. Plus I don't want to pay to see IMAP settings/sign-in to more than one account on mobile (Proton).