What's your email setup for privacy in 2026?

Curious what people using these days for email privacy. The
landscape seems to have changed a lot:

• ProtonMail went mainstream but some complain about lock-in
• Tutanota rebranded to Tuta, mixed reviews
• Self-hosted is more accessible but deliverability is still hard
• New players popping up with different approaches (E2E,sovereign hosting, etc.)

What's your current setup? Especially interested in:

1. Provider or self-hosted?
2. E2E encryption — do you actually use it?
3. Custom domain or provider domain?
4. How do you handle the fact that the other side usually uses Gmail anyway?

Comments

[Privacy.Fish]

I would split “email privacy” into a few separate choices, because they solve different problems:

• provider trust: what the mail host can see, retain, or be compelled to hand over
• account linkage: whether one address becomes your identity everywhere
• local storage: whether your mailbox lives forever in someone else's webmail
• counterparties: most people you email may still be on Gmail/Outlook, so metadata and delivery realities still exist

My personal bias is toward custom domains + aliases for compartmentalization, and toward local-first storage when the workflow allows it. E2E is useful, but for most normal email threads the bigger day-to-day wins are reducing account linkage, recovery-phone exposure, tracking pixels, and long-lived server-side archives.

Disclosure: I work on marketing/community for privacy.fish, so I am biased here. We are building (WIP) around one specific tradeoff: SSH-key access, no webmail, local-first mail storage, short server-side retention, and fewer convenience features in exchange for a smaller provider-side data surface. It is not the right fit for everyone, but it is the kind of setup I would put in the “privacy over convenience” bucket.

[William Weiner]

Mailbox.org encrypted at rest. Email Parrot VPE as aliasing and sanitizing layer. Emails only come to my mail or go out from my mailbox through a VPE alias.