I personally use hosted Exchange for $4/month¹ and think it's the best option out there. What matters to me is support is good, your email won't get detected as spam, they support push on iOS and they have datacenters in Europe, USA and Asia.

[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/exchange-online

i doubt that MS is an improvement over Google when it comes to privacy concerns.

MSFT doesn't read your email to target you with ads.

AFAIK Google doesn't do that anymore.

Source: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...

That does say they don't read your email for ad personalisation, but it doesn't say they don't read your email.

Reading your email for data gathering is their entire business model so if they don't explicitly say they don't, you should assume they do.

Their business model is reading your email for ad personalization. How else would they make money from reading it?

Marketing research.

You really don't know that.

MS built Win10 to spy on you and build a business from data mining. Why would they not do that for email? (Or, more likely, change Outlook's ToS to allow it once you are hooked.)

You could say that of any email provider, but ProtonMail is under GDPR so it makes it a safer alternative.

What? If you're an EU citizen you're "under GDPR" no matter who your provider is.

> but ProtonMail is under GDPR

I thought GDPR was European union? Protonmail is in Switzerland.

I haven't read this yet so can't summarise, but here it is: https://protonmail.com/blog/gdpr-email-compliance/

Lots of people are "under GDPR". Us for example :)

https://fastmail.blog/2018/05/24/gdpr-is-here/

I believe they do, but you can opt Out?

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/280093-outlook-com-opt...