European email providers

An email provider gives you addresses, mailboxes and the servers that receive and send your mail. Almost all offer webmail in the browser, along with IMAP and SMTP so you can use Thunderbird, Apple Mail or a phone client. Around that sit spam filtering, aliases, storage quotas, and often calendar and contact sync so one account covers everyday communication.

Mail is the master key to every other account you own, and mailboxes are stored, not just transmitted, so where the servers stand is not a detail. Proton Mail, Posteo and mailbox are operated by European companies, which puts the stored messages under EU data protection law rather than US disclosure rules. People searching for European email providers should also weigh how easily a mailbox moves out again.