That's fair enough (and I am using gmail precisely because I have no way to pay another service provider -- banking while living in a country that you are not a permanent resident of is tricky). However, the entire thread is about what service should you use if you are worried about privacy.
Although available in Japan where I live, there is literally no way to transfer money out of my bank. You may think it odd, but getting a bank account in a foreign country is actually hard. The bank I use is not my choice, but the choice of my former employer -- that's how I got the account. When I set up my own consulting company, I ended up using the same bank. I'm trying get out of it. I have an account with an offshore bank, but going through the paperwork to actually deliver my pay cheque into it is rather daunting (even though I own the company that pays me!). It will be dramatically easier when I get permanent residence status (which I probably can get whenever I get around to applying for it -- and I should do it sooner rather than later).
But anyway, there are other people in the same situation, where they literally can't pay for things online. I just wanted to indicate that I understood the situation. But thanks for the pointers. It looks pretty useful if I ever get in the situation where I could use it.
I don't understand how am I paying for Gmail. I never noticed any ads there (I know that there are ads, but it's hard to find them unless you're searching for them specifically), actually I'm rarely even using web interface and Gmail doesn't add any ads to IMAP-served mail. For me Gmail is absolutely free. May be it uses mail information to target ads for me, but I'm not even sure that I should consider that as a payment. I prefer targeted ads over untargeted ads anyway.
For the privacy, quality, and features it offers at the reasonable price of $50/year, I would say that it's a fantastic alternative. It'd be hard-pressed to find anything free that is on par.
Privacy wise, you're paying for the service so there's a reasonable expectation that they're not mining your emails to build a profile of you. Unlike Google they have no ads to serve you.
> all your personal emails are stored in [someone else's] servers.
Well, yeah. That's true for everything except for hardware you actually own.
They're saying it's better than storing it on Google's servers, not that it's bulletproof.
There really isn't a way to have impenetrable email. It's all about what type and level of risks you're willing to take.
E.g. are you concerned more about rubber stamps or software exploits? Are you more concerned about usage pattern profiles or someone actually reading the content of your messages?
Different people have different priorities and there is no one single best option.
In my 6+ years of being forced to use Office 365 for one of my accounts - it is a flaming POS. Plagued by poor performance, regular (unexplained!) outages and has series issues with data consistency and don’t even get me started on it’s terrible rules system.
Let's not forget that with slightly more money that Fastmail or Protonmail are asking for just one mailbox, MSFT is offering you a whole office suit plus 1TB of storage.
Your criticism regarding functionality might be true, but there is no reason for competitors to charge more.
I'm just a simple email user -- 50 emails per week -- and I don't keep them in my inbox. As soon as I'm done with them, I delete them. A simple 50MB inbox is sufficient for me. I just need an ad-less mail box. For me anything beyond 5$/year is expensive as hell.
I'm using my own domain, so it's $5 per month. Considering that I'm using VPS for less than $1 per month, that price seems absurdly high. I would consider paid mail for $5/year with 25GB storage and fastmail features, otherwise free mail looks much better.
Even $5 is not bad, I’m guessing most HN readers wouldn’t miss $5 a month.
Anyway services like Facebook extract around that amount from you via targeted ads, I’m happy to pay if it allows to me to isolate myself from that a bit.