They market on privacy and fail to deliver as I keep pointing out. Perhaps this isn't entirely their fault because of regulations and the way the Internet industry operates. I recognize this, but this informs me to be skeptical of all corporations. Self hosting is also problematic because the big providers are essentially using their monopoly power to lock residential IP addressed email out.

As far as the meta credit card data, yes they do keep it.

"We do not retain full credit card details, we only save your name and the last 4 digits of the credit card number. " -Proton

I am not a fan of any corporation, but to illustrate a point Mullvad VPN does not store this information on their servers at all. There is some nuance with Swiss law where VPN provider can't be compelled to hand over logs but email providers can be compelled if the user or provider chooses to use or turn on a logging feature. I don't speak their language(s) so I could be misreading these details.

"It is therefore our policy to never store any activity logs or metadata and to have as minimal data retention as possible. " -Mullvad

Having this separation is just another layer of privacy that illustrates that a company that is focused on privacy can continue to innovate to increase protection. If you are going to pay for privacy, you should expect excellence. Not exactly what state law allows. That is the floor not the ceiling.

Proton is low effort and that has resulted in governments abusing their power to out protestors/criminals/etc. There are multiple cases of this happening which has also forced Proton to become an arbitrator of investigations.

You see, they do fight back for some users but not all. This obviously creates an enormous conflict of interest because a private corporation should not be the arbitrator of the law in this way.

Needless to say the bigger a corporation grows the more concerning this becomes. A market with a few dominate providers allows for abuses and Proton is unfortunately part of the problem at this point. I suppose their is some lesser of the evils argument for using their service that I don't care to entertain.