Been using fastmail for over 10 years and it's fantastic. Two thing you should be aware though: 1st Australia is part of the five eyes, 2nd they have their servers (last I checked) in new york.
I considered switching from Proton to Fastmail, because Proton seems to run slow in Australia. Immediately stopped considering once I realized they delete your account if you don't pay for 6 months (and by extension, you'll lose all your connected accounts).
So if you're homeless, arrested, deported, or in a coma and come out of it you'll end up losing your entire digital life.
It’s a real shame about Proton. Seems like such a convenient ecosystem, but with the CEO’s idiotic position, and the fact the Swiss government can and has forced them to log your IP, that’s too fishy for me.
Also, none of the ones I checked take Monero, which seems like the only actually untraceable payment method. Cash by mail is pretty good but still too traceable, and other cryptos are just so idiotically easy to trace that you might as well use a bank transfer.
I don't feel the need to be complete anonymous, like you. But I do know of a group of people, who made an arrangement for 1 person to pay for all services they use online. There's no real trail to any other than the one person. It works quite well for them, and they pay this person in cash...
I do ! But to be clear, since Proton can be asked to log your IP, you must use a VPN to even sign up for Proton itself in the first place to prevent them from ever knowing your real IP.
So being fully anonymous on Proton is pretty circuitous.
Buy Monero with real money
Sign up to Mullvad, which truly doesn’t log your IP
Change some of the Monero for bitcoin
Sign up for Proton while using Mullvad, pay with the Bitcoin
Switzerland is still not part of the EU. Proton, Informaniak and Kolab should have the Swiss flag and not EU. It's not the same laws and they are not forced to apply GDPR to their policies.
There are a lot of privacy-focused alternatives, but not all of them are. Fastmail and Infomatrix are two excellent options that are more focused on convenience
I just recently switched from gmail to Mailfence with a custom domain, and I'm pretty happy thus far. I looked into it for a while trying to find the best option, and Mailfence turned out the best for me. Tuta was too locked down for me and Mailbox just rubbed me the wrong way. Mailbox has had a known major security issue with custom domains for literally 7 years now and still has yet to addressed it, their webmail is extremely slow and buggy (would switch to German randomly), they don't encrypt messages at rest (which to be fair isn't too important, but a lot of other services still do it), and I've seen multiple reports of their support being sub-par. I feel like they're probably still fine, but I just feel more confident in Mailfence.
There is also „poczta interia” which is email provider. They support third party email clients and it’s free. Their official app has ads and interface is in polish
Garbage tier IMO. So much worse than Gmail in terms of UI and legit email going to spam or not being delivered at all. So if you're going to use a free one, just use Gmail.
There's a lot of cheap mail-hotels, and a domain name is not costly either. I pay maybe 10 $ a year for both, and the mail is completely mine. I use Thunderbird as my mail-client on both windows, linux and android. Never had an issue, it just works.
I think that the biggest issue for a lot of people is, that they have to spend a little money on it. They buy shoes for 100 $ without thinking much about it, but private communication they often want for free...