[red_admiral]

If you're doing low-bandwidth stuff like sending e-mails, TOR (which is of course free) should be your first choice.

But you have to absolutely "air-gap" that from the rest of your identity, such as not making a proton e-mail address over TOR and then using your usual email address as the recovery one.

[SomeoneFromCA]

nah tor is not trustworthy, as it also exposes you as a tor user; in a less developed countries, where not many people know how to use Tor, you'll stick out real bad. It is much better to use shady random proxy servers you'll find online, before connecting to Tor; it is extremely slow, but much safer, as the authoritarian state monitors won't be able to see that subpoenaed ip adresses come from tor exit nodes, conveniently at the same time period you (and basically no one else) were using Tor.