JonEFive

Yeah, I was gonna say this. Not supporting IMAP is a very intentional design choice. If you’re using IMAP then you don’t care about encryption at rest.

Before you say “but I do my own encryption” - that’s great, but do you think the vast majority of IMAP users do?

Tuta’s philosophy is that either you care about encryption or they’re not the right provider for you.

I’m genuinely asking: Do you not know how email works?

You either get a cloud host or run your own email server. You can’t just run Outlook or whatever on your desktop without a server. And yes, in this case setting up a mail server on your PC counts as self-hosting. But when your PC is turned off, so is your mail server. Email services only try to send so many times before they give up and bounce the message back.

Unless you’re talking about other services that Proton offers, but your comment about switching from Google to Proton and the original post suggest to me that you mean email.

The free tier is somewhat limited. Many users choose to pay. So with enough people paying, it really doesn’t cost them anything to give away small mailboxes for free to those who need it.