Tutanota is now free for open source projects
tutanota.com
tutanota.com
The two big hassles of self-hosting email are incoming spam on the receiving side, and deliverability issues on the sending due to very aggressive antispam measures at the big email providers. Hosted email services' product is basically continuous maintenance of spam filtering on the receiving side, and e.g. building IP reputation and retrying failed deliveries through a clean IP pool on the sending side. Merely running an IMAP or SMTP server without these efforts is comparatively easy.
So it seems to me sufficient to use a privacy-conscious hosted provider for filtering and SMTP but not for storage, and handle storage yourself. I'm currently not doing that due to laziness but it seems like a proper and feasible thing to do. There isn't much point going overboard when the traffic is general purpose email, where the weakest link will usually be at the other person's end (and out of your control) rather than at your end.
By that logic, no one should ever switch from an insecure service to a secure service. The advantage of being backwards compatible with email is that you don't lose anything by upgrading, and for some messages you do gain something. (You shouldn't change your behaviour based on a false sense of security, though).
Ideally, the person you are communicating with would use PGP, for example if their provider is ProtonMail, so you could have end-to-end encrypted communication without having to worry about keyservers or encryption settings. Unfortunately, however, Tutanota has chosen not to use PGP because of fears of "attacks from quantum computers"[0]. Of course, their own proprietary system is vulnerable to those attacks too, but that's a minor details, and you should ignore it...
I know that data will likely be mined from my email at one end or the other, but I might as well not serve it up on a silver platter.
Chances are that most (> 50%) of it is on one provider (gmail), or maybe two or three providers. Getting those will make almost as good a profile of you as getting everything. And it's not just your email: it's also the stuff that you communicate in it, that can further spread among careless recipients, unless you live your life like a paranoid fugitive and silo all your information including (e.g.) from your family members. That, in turn, is completely neurosis inducing. It's a conundrum that I don't have an answer to, beyond "surveillance sucks".
Most of the email exchanged with my account is with mass mailing platforms, of which there's more than a few. Business/marketing email hasn't consolidated as much as the consumer market has.
"Tooter what?"
"Tutanota."
"Can you spell that please?"A lot of the users this affects are most likely also familiar with tutanota's services I'd guess.
I added some small editorialising to a headline I posted a few hours ago, and it wasn't removed... But changed into different, and IMO worse, editorialising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29342306 went from "Is the new 16-inch MacBook Pro a pro-only machine? (+Video)", where the addition in parentheses was meant to indicate "Also includes video", to "Is the new 16-inch MacBook Pro a pro-only machine? [video]", which to me seems to imply it's only a video clip.
But Idunno, maybe the latter idiom is usually read in the sense I meant on here.