The situation with Protonmail handing over data in Spain is nothing new.  But,

When I tell people they should self-host email on a VPS, they often respond with “email is not private.”  And that’s true, and that’s why you should self-host it, BECAUSE it’s not private and people force you to use it anyway.

So because you’re going to leak data, it should be to someone just renting you a computer, and not to someone literally administering your account and running the software you’re using.  That makes it so easy to monitor it.

And if you don’t want to go through the trouble, we have combo packages to include Email, Chat (XMPP or SimpleX), and Cryptpad, all on one tiny VPS!  Cryptpad is an end-to-end secure replacement for Google docs.  We just set it up and then hand over the passwords/keys to you.  So we’re just tech support, and not the cloud host.

Is email flawed?  Yes.  But you can get as self-sovereign as you can be, and even more so with your documents and chats.