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.

Proton gang checking in. So much so that I pay them 😊 (actually needed paid features)
Same. Proton gang.
I have plenty to criticize about their lack of creature comforts, but alas.
- Yeah.... I love proton but their android app also needs work. They'll get there!
Indeed, same here but while using my own domain name, this way if some day, for whatever reason, either they go "bad" or I find "better" I can switch without much worry.
Protonmail and SimpleLogin has been a great combo.
- Then pay for it if that's a feature you want. They make a product, and want to get paid for it.

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.

Its reliable but I might look into other options that aren't so far away
- Why would that matter?

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

Also comes with an XMPP account built in, although they should probably update their Ejabberd sometimes 😅
Opinion on the price changes? 1 eur plan doesn't work with custom domains anymore so I'm looking for alternatives.
- Tbh I did not realize their prices increased. I'm happy to pay for their service though. It's the only subscription I pay.

Is self hosting a valid answer?

I host my own email.

Where do you host that's reasonably priced and still has an IP pool that isn't immediately blacklisted by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft?
- I self host an email server at home with a 1€/month domain from strato.de, and I just use their SMTP server as relay. No issues so far, and they also include a backup mx for when my home server goes offline.
- Well I have some hardware colocated at a DC so I can't speaktoo much about cost plus IP reputation. I can also only rely on individual IP blacklist checking. If MS has decided on their own to blacklist an entire subnet there isn't much to be done about that.
- ICD Soft
  I've used them for 20 years. I've never had an email problem. Their spam detection and mitigation is pretty good too.
On the one hand I hear self hosting email is great, on the other hand I hear it's a pain in the ass to get whitelisted
- I've had zero problems getting whitelisted, but I also don't send email much these days.
- Well my IP isn't on any blacklists but I can't speak on getting whitelistred" by providers. I can send to gmail without going to spam. Idon't generally send much email though.
Just curious, are you using DDNS or do you have a static IP?
- I have static IPs. That is going to be a required item for hosting 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.

I also switched to Fastmail. iirc they are not the best privacy wise as they are based in Australia. They do however have a no-nonsense IMAP connection (unlike Protonmail) and they allow multiple custom domains without extra pay. The IMAP connection however is not available on the lowest tier.
So far I've not regretted the switch, and it also integrates nicely with 1Password masked mails.

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

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.

They are rewriting android app from scratch rn
- I've heard that. Boy does it need it. But I'll admit I don't like that their focus seems to be on introducing new products instead of making their existing lineup more reliable/performant. And not making many strides in the Linux world.
Fastmail here as well. I don't need super privacy. The phone app is great. Was easy to setup my personal domain.

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!

I’m gonna steal your walmart wifi
- LOL, go for it, I gave Walmart the name 'Anonymous Human', as if I was gonna give them a real name.. 😂🤣
My last trip to Walmart I used the email secretshopper@Walmart.com

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.

Is that true? They don't encrypt labels on proton?
- Sadly, yes. A Proton team member on Reddit confirmed it a couple years back:
  Folder/label names are visible to the server (for filters and other reasons) as are email metadata. Message and attachment contents are encrypted and not visible to the server.
  https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/hxomoy/are_mail_folderstags_encrypted_or_private/fzc6wry/
  Do note that this is ONLY true for Mail. Calendar, and Drive does encrypt folders/label names.
- Subject lines are also not encrypted, unlike Tutanota.

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.

This is why I like posteo. They are cheap and easy
- That's actually really expensive. 2GB is not a lot unless you're starting from scratch. My 50gb account would cost me ~15€/mo with aliases and extra storage fees.
  But most importantly they don't support bringing your own domains which makes it a non-starter for most people looking for custom email solution.
second

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.

First runbox user I've seen in the wild. +1 for runbox, it has worked great for in the last ~6 years or so.
The 100 aliases you get are very useful. The fact it costs money may be a turn off for many, but I'd personally wouldn't trust a privacy statement from a closed source free service.
Keep in mind that runbox 7 is the only Foss option. The other one is proprietary
- How do you think it compares to Posteo? I mainly chose them because environmental awareness, privacy consciousness and usage of libre software.

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

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.

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

It just works

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Got a source for that? Proton isn't able to access to any user emails. I believe Swiss law also makes it illegal for them to provide user information without a (Swiss) court order.
The only case I've heard of that was similar was when the Swiss court ordered them to provide all the info they had on a user. This was the last IP address they logged on from and a recovery email the user had entered. The recovery email is an optional thing the user had set up on their account. They also used this same email address to sign up for a Twitter account. They were able to get enough data from Twitter to identify the person.
- Courts can require you to provide your password in some circumstances. Where your email is stored is irrelevant.
- Yes I do, and I tried encouraged my source to make the entire thing public but no luck there. In this case the person was already identified it wasn't much of an issue, the issue is that Proton simply provided everything to an US court without even a flinch. Apparently they can access user emails and they do without much fuzz.
While this is undesirable, you can't expect a corporation to break the law for you just because. proton at least is better than the rest of the corporate, for-profit providers who sell your data to the highest bidder.
- Different country, this shouldn't have happened.

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.

How is your deliverability? I've heard private servers are often blocked outright by the big providers but don't have any first hand experience with it myself.

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.

I could invite you.

This would be nice

I use disroot.

They now require non free software to create an account which is a deal breaker for me

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

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?

I just want to use a email provider who I can trust

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

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

edit: /s

Nothing to hide, but also nothing I want to share either…