Hmm I was just the other day contemplating moving my domain and email off of Google/Gsuite nd ProtonMail was one alternative I was considering. Now I'm hesitant - what other options are there?
If you are concerned about privacy, you shouldn't be on Google at all. Move to almost any other provider and you are already a step ahead in terms of privacy.
You aren't going to get absolute privacy in a single step, if ever. You do the best you can, iterate, and do better. Moving away from Google is step 1. Step 2 is to continue research, and potentially move again if it fits your threat model.
The issue that you have with Protonmail seems to be that they enabled IP logging in response to a lawful government request. Google logs IP by default, scans your messages, etc. It baffles me that there is less outrage at that than this single case.
I agree, it's non-trivial and perhaps my comment came across in a negative light. But, I think people are overstating the implication of the issue at hand - especially when you compare Protonmail (and others) to the big providers such as Google and Microsoft.
So in case the government is out to get you, both options will lead to the same outcome: your IP address is revealed.
You could literally change to Fastmail and cancel your Gmail account before tomorrow.
There are hundreds of excuses for not switching from Google or for staying on Facebook etc. But only one outcome: action.
To start with, I forwarded all my Gmail to Outlook.com. As email came in and I read it, I would log into the site that sent it and change my email in there. As time went on, things slowly migrated out of Gmail. I told friends and family I was switching my email address but fortunately for me basically no human ever emails me. The few that do, I can receive the email at Gmail and send a response from Outlook so they get the update.
Now I'm about 99% migrated over, and the few stragglers that still send to Gmail make it to my new inbox anyway so I'm never missing anything.
So, what are the alternatives?
Being bounced as spam not an issue for me.
YMMV depending on who had your IP address previously. If you get a bad (previously blacklisted) IP, then you can always spin up a new VM.
Some of the really low-end VPS providers are so relaxed they get their AS number blacklisted in uceprotect.
But you're asking the wrong questions. Email itself has retries built in, it doesn't need perfect uptime. What you should be asking is how badly Gmail deciding you might be a spammer and not caring about fixing that for one person is going to torpedo your deliverability rate.
It took about 1 day to set it all up, where most of the time was spent waiting for DNS changes and for Microsoft to de-list my IP from their blacklist (I probably got a bad IP from DigitalOcean).
After that I have logged in to the instance every two weeks to update the machine, haven't had any problems as of yet.
The uptime shouldn't be any problem, as the other mail providers should retry sending their mail, it's even mentioned in the RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4
Hopefully I haven't missed any mail when updating mailcow-dockerized, I'll never know, hehe.
Really easy and a great experience, compared to doing it from scratch.
By default, they both apply strict security practices so you won't have an open relay, worried about domain masking etc.
Either are about a day to set up and its mostly DNS.
But even beyond that, can they be compelled by a court order to install software on the VPS (and securing against someone with unlimited access to the VM host is… about as practical as securing against someone with physical access)? I'd assume so?
The main benefit to me for runnign my own email is owning my own data/domain, and not having to allow third parties (aka google) full access to all my emails.
It is your call how long you save/enable logs and if you save them to tmpfs and encrypt your swap. You can also encourage your users to 7-zip encrypt sensitive contents. You can also add specific MX routes in transport maps to use VPN connections to make connection logging less useful. Tinc (open source VPN) is great for this, as traffic routes in user-space through your mesh and therefor traffic can end up at its destination without a direct connection.
I think you'll have a very hard time finding an email provider that behaves any differently from ProtonMail on this count.