Is Zoho not mainstream? I thought they do business email mostly.

I use protonmail. One possible downside is you can't use an external mail client, but I do not make use of this feature.

I have heard good things about PosteoMail

It's not popular here in Mexico! so at least here, it's not mainstream (but people mostly use gmail and sometimes outlook/hotmail addresses, rarely iCloud ones). It probably is more frequent in other places.

I would advise staying away from Tutanota, or Tuta, as they're called now. I have been a paying customer of theirs for 3 years now and the service is not very good, while I have never felt like they were deliberately providing poor service or anything like that, and they are definitely a cut above google or other "free" providers, their applications are all terrible, and improving at a snail's pace.

No proper email search (enjoy letting mails index for 20 minutes everytime you want to search for something, oh, and resetting the search date range params everytime too), very clunky, bloated and inefficient interfaces that just aren't nice to use for anything other than tapping on mails, poorly implemented dark theme that makes lots of emails hard to read, and a litany of other problems.

Uptime isn't that good either, while not exactly terrible, its been down often enough to cause issues for me, which I can honestly say has never happened with any other provider.

This next one is more of a trade off of the type of service than anything they're doing wrong, but IMO its a trade off that isn't worth it given email's inherently security averse nature: because the service is built around encrypted email, you cannot use another email client like thunderbird to get around the UI, which would be a fair trade, until you realise that 99% of emails just aren't going to be sent E2E, emails sent E2E can be forwarded on non encrypted by accident very easily and for those times that you do use encryption, you can use PGP with other services easily. (PGP isn't all that good either BTW)

I'm looking for a new provider at the minute and am seriously thinking about running my own mail server on my VPS, I have an email server up and running for my website already, but that approach has got its own issues with getting caught in spam filters and stuff.

I wouldn't send anything you think seriously needs to be kept secret over email, ever, use something less full of holes, or use analog comms.

Update: I ended up rolling then unrolling my own email server, set up is simple, but the bullshit is unending, stuff kept getting caught in spam filters no matter what I tried. I ended up going with mailbox.org, its a little expensive (2.50 euro a month) but it does everything I need, including custom domain support and tons of aliases. I'll move off of tuta completely over the next month or so.

@unhealthymelon not sure if you knew this before or learned that the hard way, but hand-rolling your own email server is probably the single hardest thing about web development. You just have to solve constant problems, only to figure out your sent email goes straight to spam, and then you gotta solve that problem as well.

that's 1 thing I'll gladly pay for.

But actually I have [email protected] set up as a gmail alias. So with the help of cloudflare, I can forward those emails to my personal gmail and compose outgoing emails with the @basementcommunity domain and it's 100% free

Learned that when I tried to send a test email from my @ctrl-c.club to my @live email..

With ZoHo you can use a custom domain and its free.. But its targeted towards buisnesses (although you don't need a buisness to use it). But I don't use it anymore (and don't really like it) because design and I don't have a domain.

I had some idea there was going to be lots of issues but I wasn't prepared for how uncooperative everyone involved is, first two hosting providers didn't want to let me run SMTP even though it said it was allowed on their site, third had to be bugged a couple times to let me, then endless spam reports and bounces even though Dmarc, Dkim etc. were all configured properly. Ironically I had no issues with google of all entities, once my records were set correctly I could email gmail freely and not get blocked.

It was a learning experience but too frustrating for me to want to maintain it, mailbox is a little pricy but I've had no issues since, even got per address PGP for my IRL and Domain email sorted out without issue despite my domain email just being an alias.

Now I'm trying to unpick everything from Tuta and move over to mailbox full time.

The best email provider is one which you host on your own webserver with your own domain, if you can't do that then you can try ProtonMail, but that is about it, and that has its own issues anyways. I would stick with cock.li if TOR is necessary and you end up ok with less professionalism, otherwise, get a custom domain and use that. I guess you could just go the route of no email, but that is rather annoying to do, and likely not worth it unless you somehow do something like IRC over TOR or I2P, and have it always running, as you'd have to do with an email server. Do wish that email were (actually) possible over TOR, it would be ridiculous due to the link-sizes, but a cool idea.