A while back I started on this journey, and as most people did, I’ve had my ups and downs and went through the learning curve, I’ve now reached the point of so much knowledge that I truly know, I dont know shit. People of Lemmy I come to you today because idk what to do, I recently made a free account with proton, their subscription is fairly cheap so idm paying the monthly tier of 15GB so I can have control over ending it whenever I please instead of being locked in for a year. Now, I heard about Tuta but never dived much into it, i know Proton has had its controversies (Don’t be shy of reminding me of what they were), but what are my options here truly for a proper FOSS email provider? I can negate the free part for a reasonable price, but truly private AND secure is a must.
Self Hosting isn’t an option yet for personal reasons unless it’s completely free.


I recently switched to Proton, mostly to get out of Gmail and Hotmail.
I did this firstly to get out of the yankee services, not because I trust Proton: their claims of private mail are mostly bullshit, and they do clearly behave like a CIA honeypot, so I don’t trust them (as I didn’t trust the other two), so I use the free account (also there are increasingly fewer and fewer free options nowadays) just to get emails that I’m more than okay being known, or where my domain emails don’t work.
Everything else goes to an assortment of addresses on my webstorage with my domain, running on a national server outside of all the cursed 9/14/etc eyes. Even still I expect them to be fully visible under a court order. But I get no one actively profiting off their info, and get no spam there. So I’m very happy with the change.
Proton has come with some not outright lies, but misleading advertisements. I understand the thin line that privacy companies have manage between appealing to a larger audience to get economies of scale but not mislead at the same time to achieve that. It is hard for them since we expect prices of other non-privacy oriented providers but with far more complex systems that required far more RAM, more storage, more audits, more special expertise, etc. Proton is a success at Privacy but Tuta I respect more.