Interests: News, Finance, Computer, Science, Tech, and Living
Server no. But hosted domain email is probably what I will do in the next year. Probably at Fastmail or at Namecheap. I have the domain just waiting.
In a way, I already have a mail server on my VPS, just never installed IMAP. Not what I want for every day though.
For privacy specifically take a look at https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/ .
For just a paid provider where you are the customer not the product, consider FastMail or a hosting offering such as NameCheap. By hosting I mean the one that is part of their hosting plans not their email specific offering though that is interesting also but quite expensive.
You get an IT staff that is MS and Windows certified, what sort of answer do you expect them to give? As far as IT staff where I worked, they often had issues with resolving Windows problems say nothing about Linux. Generally for Windows, I had to get to level 3 support before they knew anything. Even then I often had to tell them what needed to be done rather then them actually knowing. Some of this is lack of skill, some if it is under staffing, some of it is restrictive processes, and some organizational issues. You had to know how to work the system on one hand, and which issues just to not waste time on. Not saying they did not try hard, but without facilitation their results were often insufficient.
That does not mean you cannot use Linux however. Just means the main IT group does not support. We had a separate group that ran the Linux compute cluster we used. I also typically always had a Linux VM on my workstation too to use FOSS tools. Not sure that would be allowed these days since IT has gotten nuts about security, and with that they have generally grabbed a lot of power regarding what can and cannot be done on “their” hardware and on “their” networks. You can also get exceptions to a lot of those rules if you can justify it and if your management is willing to run it up the flag pole. If not, your working for the wrong people.
Fastmail was never a recommended privacy specific provider if that is the big concern. Does not mean they do not have value.
Personally livng in the US I prefer a US provider. Geopolitics is one driver. Also US gov is not allowed to spy on their own citizens. If on the other hand they cross the border things are different. Not really many good US choices. EU has a lot of good choices.