Answer to this:
https://www.rooshvforum.com/threads/paying-for-an-online-e-mail-provider.39422/
What do you use email for? I more-or-less never use email for personal use. It's level of security is very low, looking at it from any angle. You can do all you want to secure your email, but there is a ninety-odd percent chance you are receiving and sending emails to emails hosted by Google, M$ etc.
I use email for two things: work; and personal financial and shopping sites.
There are a few things I would recommend:
1) don't use major services like Gmail
2) don't use services that retain all your data on their servers (like Protonmail without Bridge) - you want to be able to access them via IMAP and scrub them on the mail server
3) use your own domain with a catchall (can accept email to any address on a domain, e.g.
[email protected],
[email protected]...)
4) delete emails from the mail server once downloaded, sent
On point 2) if you happen to have your centralised 'private' email account subpoenaed - you don't want 10 years of your emails on the server (which you can't search anyway on Protonmail) resting on their server. I run my own mail server and emails are scrubbed from the server after they are downloaded to my computer. So if the feds get access to my server, all they will have is whatever new emails that come in.
I'm not sure what service encompasses all those, but Protonmail using their Bridge will probably do it.
But I think the more imperative aspect to have covered is having a catchall email on your own domain. You can find cheap domain extensions here:
https://domz.io/. You can get them from at least $3/year; maybe $1-2. You need to make sure the renewal price is the same price.
There are a number of bodies that are creating profiles on us with up to 10,000 attributes (as of 2017 -
https://crackedlabs.org/en/corporate-surveillance). If you are using big tech, you are giving them reams of info. If you care about your digital privacy all of that has to go - Google account, Facebook, IG, Youtube, Whatsapp...
Your data is bound together on certain fingerprints, e.g. email, phone, address, cookies for big tech - trackers and ads. You should use a unique email for every website you sign up to on your catchall domain. If you do this, it will foil a lot of this automatic binding. Also when you buy stuff online have it delivered to different fake names.
Fretting too much about email security is not worth it. Any centalised system will go under if they don't hand over what the feds want. The best solution is hosting it yourself, but then your corespondents will almost definitely be compromised. If you wants relative assurance in private communications you need two people communicating via Matrix/Element, with both users on either Linux or Graphene/Calyx.