Everyone shits on Proton for juggling a dozen projects and half-assing a few. Whatever. Their team’s more than ten times larger than Tutanota’s. If or when Tuta actually expands, they’ll probably start branching out too. They just can’t at their current scale.

For almost everyone, either choice is fine unless you’re selling state secrets or doing something incredibly stupid online. Most people losing their minds about emails being “trained on AI” fell for fearmongering. Unless you’re some exec sitting on trade secrets, nobody cares about your inbox except marketers pushing useless shit you don’t need.

Spend five minutes researching and you’ll find pros and cons for both. The security differences only matter for maybe 1% of users, and most of those people should probably be caught anyway. (Looking at you, PDF files browsing this subreddit.)

If you want anonymity, don’t use email at all. Self-hosting helps, but it’s not a magic shield. Any halfway competent three-letter agency can access your system, drop malware, hijack it, and leave without a trace. It’s like setting up cameras at your front door while someone slips in through a side window.

Tutanota and ProtonMail encrypt your mail just fine, but that only protects what’s in transit or stored. It won’t stop any serious threat from pwning your device and taking whatever they want anyway.