Self-hosted email is the hardest it's ever been, but also the easiest
It hurts my soul to see a well-reasoned and well-intentioned post like this start off with good advice then immediately recommend ProtonMail.<p>ProtonMail is about the single worst experience I’ve ever had with Big Email. I really do wonder how many people they’ve harmed but get away with it because the happy path works for most people most of the time.<p>The worry I have with something like Gmail or Outlook is that they can just take away your access to your inbox without reason or recourse, but it’s never actually happened to anyone I know. It happened with ProtonMail though - I set up an account for a family member, updated some of their online registrations to point to it, then a couple of days later it was locked out permanently.<p>Thankfully they hadn’t got to the point of using the account for anything they cared about yet, just a couple of big retailer mailing lists (they’re not the most tech literate so move very slowly with things like this). Literally it was receiving mailing list emails from two well known, non-shady retailers and that’s it.<p>Password not forgotten, No way to have the account unlocked, no way to find out why it was locked, no way to have the account deleted, no way to get access to repoint the accounts using that address because now ProtonMail owned those other website accounts (not your email not your account).<p>Pretty much just [you can’t have your account back, you can’t find out why, you can’t appeal, and every email that ever lands here in the future belongs to us now so go fish].<p>They are by a long way the worst experience I ever had with a provider of any online service, so much so that I’ve since moved my own e-mail that was there back to outlook before some arbitrary spam caused the same thing to happen to me. Never again.