This thread basically illustrates the challenges for a beginner, such as myself.

I've been locked into the Google ecosystem for nearly two decades and am now trying to free myself.

I'd like to migrate to a hybrid solution that involves self-hosted NextCloud synchronized with a cloud provider that I can trust more than Google.

However:

Proton apparently makes false, or at least misleading, marketing claims and doesn't fight a vast majority of its inbound government requests.

Tuta has been publicly accused by a member of the intelligence community of being a honeypot.

The rest of the email providers seem to implement even fewer protections, relative to these two.

So, what's a guy to do?

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that either of these companies are bad or that I believe that they're actually honeypots. I'm just trying to illustrate the challenges faced by newcomers (and probably all of us).

While I'd prefer to absolutely maximize privacy and security on all fronts, given that my first goal is de-googling, I will probably start with Proton and NextCloud and re-evaluate from there, but I'm open to suggestions.

Thank you all -- I really appreciate this community.