I was considering the cheapest plan on Fastmail even though it's more than double the cost of Posteo, mainly because of the number of aliases Fastmail provides.

I was considering the cheapest plan on Fastmail even though it's more than double the cost of Posteo, mainly because of the number of aliases Fastmail provides. But this recent development and my discomfort with what's been happening in the U.S. (Fastmail's servers are in the U.S.) have made it easier to look beyond Fastmail. It looks like governments in democratic countries around the world have decided that they must deny privacy (despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights having an article on privacy [1]) and have control over who's talking to who, when, where, how (what apps/platforms they use), how often, and about what. All these laws and lawless surveillance is very disturbing. Except for some courts of law (and in certain cases the whims of the judges), the public at large is at a big risk, both by being kept ignorant and by activists being silenced. On email, if custom domain support is not a must, I would recommend Posteo.de. For custom domains, providers like mailbox.org, mailfence and runbox might work. I wouldn't recommend ProtonMail or Tutanota because they make porting email data to another provider cumbersome and impossible, respectively (IMAP support in ProtonMail is through a bridge application, while there is no IMAP support in Tutanota). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#Universal_Dec...