I have used RiseUp.net email for more than a decade. They are a fantastic
service, aimed at supporting people doing activist work. They use only free
software on principle, and because of their activist focus, they place a high
priority on constantly improving security and avoiding handing over user data
to any third party, governmental or commercial. They own their own bare metal
servers, which are hosted in a colocation facility they help to run. They are
funded by donations, and run a fund-raising drive once a year to cover their
costs.
There are only two major downsides to using RiseUp for email. New accounts
have to be manually approved by admins - it speeds things up if you can get
endorsement from existing users - and you have to give some information about
the kinds of activism you will use the account to support (this could include
software freedom advocacy). The second issue, related to the first, is that
they could not cope if everyone who wants a free code powered tried to sign
up with them. The service depends on a team of trusted volunteers, and
donations to cover their external costs, and there are hard limits to their
ability to scale up their service to accommodate more users.
There is a desperate need for more organisations that can roll out the type
of technical infrastructure that RiseUp have assembled, but aimed at people
using email for normal personal or business use (supporting custom domains
etc). I'd love to see groups like RiseUp putting out detailed documentation
on exactly what software they use, and how they set it up (eg how many
physical and virtual servers they use, and how the various services are
divided amongst them), so their services can be replicated by other groups
wanting to set up similar service, or to self host.
