Openmailbox Alternatives after owner change

Openmailbox, a popular cloud storage and email service provider, began to update its service a couple of days ago which led to a two-day long outage.

After the site went back up, users of the service noticed that ownership changed hand, and that the new owners of the service made a drastic change to the service.

Update: ownership did not change, the owner of the service changed it from a non-profit organization to a Limited.

Free users of Openmailbox could use IMAP/POP to connect to their mailboxes previously. The new owner of the service, French company SASU Initix, disabled the option without prior notice for all free account owners.

This blocked the use in all email clients for free users, and left them with no choice but to use the web interface instead to do their mailing.

Related to that is the removal of the mail aliases feature. The available aliases were removed completely and stopped redirecting any messages.

According to the new pricing page on the website, IMAP, POP and SMTP access to Openmailbox accounts is only available to PRO users.

The company posted an update on the official site about the removal of the IMAP service.

The reason for this limitation is the cost of offering this protocol. In fact, due to the nature of the protocol, great loads are experienced from our side. Sadly managing all this load for free is hardly sustainable.

It acknowledges however that the transition did not went as smooth as it should have been. All free users that used the service before August 4, 2017 get one month of PRO account access.

Reactions were not pleasant to the changes. Most disliked the feature removal. Some customers stated that they understood the reason behind the change -- as the company stated that it was not viable financially to offer IMAP to free users of the service -- they disliked that the new owner did not notify customers in advance about the upcoming changes.

Openmailbox alternatives

• Disroot -- Offers access to email. cloud, forum, Dispora social network, Pastebin and more based "on principles of freedom, privacy, federation and decentralization. States no tracking, no ads, no profiling, no data mining.
• Mailbox -- Accounts start at €1 per month. Comes wihtout ads, tracking, encryption, custom domains, POP/IMAP, 2 GB of storage, aliases.
• Mailfence -- Email provider that promises no tracking, privacy protection, end to end encryption. Free account is available limited to 200 MB of storage for email and no external access. Paid accounts start at €2.50 per month.
• Posteo -- Secure, ad-free email service with 2 GB, IMAP/POP access, calendar and address book sync, data encryption, and access to calendar, contacts, document editing For €1 per month
• Protonmail -- Secure email provider, open source. Free account good for 150 messages per day and 500 MB storage. Paid accounts for €5 per month / €48 per year.
• Startmail -- By the company that runs Startpage.com. Personal accounts for $59.95 per year. Get you 10 Gigabyte of space, IMAP support, custom aliases, unlimited disposable aliases, PGP encryption.
• Teknik -- Offers email, file storage, pastebin. Free, donation-based service.
• Tutanota -- Free encrypted email box, end to end encryption, and open source. Free account with 1 GB of storage, paid accounts for €1 per month get aliases, custom domains, inbox rules and more.

Now You: Which email provider do you use, and why?