Making this its own post in case folks want to reblog it or offer commentary:
I'm no tech geek but have unintentionally spent my entire evening searching for an email provider alternative from gmail and others of its ilk. I started with a list of "degoogle" alternatives listed in a post here on tumblr and my priorities are No Ai and Privacy Focus, which go hand in hand. I'm including the ones that were mentioned in the degoogling post I saw since I had to weed them out:
Proton: has ai features now
Edison Mail: has ai email concierge
Mailfence: has ai chat assistant
Skiff is now Notion: sells itself on ai features
Thunderbird: is not an email provider, just a client - useful, but not what I am needing to start with right now.
CounterMail: looks like it lives in the 90s and is closed to new users
Ok, now the ones I found that might be options:
Mailbox.org is now Mailbox - German based, they don't really say anything about ai but they do highlight their customer support is specifically not ai chat, open source, pro Linux, privacy focused and highly recommended by many, offers a more robust "office" like suite, they updated to using PWA for mobile without an app and this currently is not compatible with Firefox apparently, there are other pros/cons and bugs with the refreshed version of this service so may want to wait and see how those pan out before switching, they do recycle old email addresses which is problematic for obvious reasons, cost starts at 1 euro a month for very basic use and offers a 30 day free trial for all tiers.
Tuta - this one seems to be a constant seesaw of good and bad: German based, the service seems good and at a good price but users say support can be slow and the ui is clunky, it's open source, there is a free trial version and then it starts at 3.60 euro or equivalent a month, available on Fdroid and for Linux if that helps (some of the others function with Linux but Fdroid is more rare), does not recycle email addresses after accounts are deleted.
StartMail - Netherlands-based, has fans and foes in the privacy-concerned nerd world, is staunchly anti-ai on their website, offers encryption but not necessarily end-to-end and after that I lose track of how things work but data is stored in a user vault and TLS is used, possibly can be buggy, offers bitcoin or paypal payment options if you want to avoid cc payment, costs 60 a year but does offer a 7 day free trial.
Posteo - German based, open source, company focus on privacy security and sustainability, may require something like Thunderbird to synchronize devices, has browser and app versions, anonymous sign up, costs 1 euro (or equivalent?) per month with optional add-ons and has anonymous payment but no free trial, seem to genuinely care about their employees as a business. cons I've seen mentioned: doesn't really have a search feature for looking through emails I guess? (you can tag them instead) and does recycle your email name apparently.
All of the above for each is clearly NOT a complete list of features/cons, just the ones that have jumped out to me.
TL;DR best option may be one of those last four, they are pretty even on what they offer and the related cons so it just depends on what you want to try and what extras offered are important to you. In general an EU email provider that you pay money for the service instead of paying with your data seems to be the direction to go. Also came across lots of recommendations for private domains but I'm too tired to go there rn.
(For the record, most reddit users prefer Proton but I hate the ai addition, and after that there isn't really a consensus but lots of support and discussion about tuta/posteo/mailbox.org/startmail if you want to search through those discussions.)
