Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
Hosting your own email is actually not that hard. It takes a fair amount of initial setup but if you do it right, it is very stable and functional. Email servers are very mature, and things like Postfix hardly need anything once set up. Getting a static IP is the hard part, but if you run it on a VPS with a good IP you can just hang onto it.
Filtering traffic via (e.g.) pfblocker feeds and spamassassin kills most spam, and it is awesome to just create and destroy your own mailboxes at will.
the problem is that your outgoing mail will be rejected every now end then. and its a major hassle to get unblocked, if you end up on some blocklist accidentally, which will happen occasionally over the years, even with no fault of your own.
Never had that issue except once - if you have an IP with a good reputation, a domain you haven’t been abusing, and all your DMARC/DKIM/SPF records set, you’re good. I had one short problem when I moved IPs and the new one was on Google’s list, everyone else was fine but Google. Instead of a new IP I emailed them and they took it off after a few weeks.