Using a email a free email provider with Thunderbird is a pain nowadays

You can get away with not giving your phone only with google and outlook but you will need recovery addresses. For those I am using proton mail, they don't require anything and for those I have the recovery key saved somewhere.

Also you will get error messages in thunderbird from outlook that it doesn't work... but it does work !

I did all that in anger but if I had to do it again I would just use one of those super cheap provider where you pay 1$ a month or even by usage and use TB with that.

Hey mail, fastmail, they all look great but I don't even pay that much to my bank or any other services so no way I am spending 5 euros or more a month for email