Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.
Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
Seriously though, nothing but recommended in every other regard. Alias management, anonymous domains you can use, configuring the sender in Thunderbird no problem, everything else was great. My colleagues didn't seem to mind this delay so much as me so it's something to be aware of but might work fine for you
Edit: I realised this is already like four years ago now, it could have gotten fixed in the meantime. It was an issue for several years before we switched away for some reason related to calendars (don't remember the details, I wasn't my choice)
I was disappointed more by their lack of communication than by the outages. And one outage wasn't even reported on their status page although they confirmed it via support. That's a very bad communication.
Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.
> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?
The Queen died of 8th September 2022.
And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.
Or move to Russia. Not recommending, just saying
I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.
Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.