They dont "cooperate with governments", they follow the laws they legally have to. All the cases I can think of where they gave info to a government with a legal order to do so, they gave information that has to be logged in order for the system to work and the subjects themselves used poor opsec eg: their real names for accounts and recovery emails...

Some privacy extremists have unrealistic expectations when they sign up to these things without fully understanding how it works and then blame the provider for something they were completely transparent about from the beginning.

I like to dish out advice without actually following it.

oh yeah, I have my own domain since Uhm 2004 and have switched providers about, hm, six times without problems. I never delete emails either (spam I do) and just use Thunderbird's drag and drop to move MA mails from one server to another.

Unfortunately, several of the author's conclusions are drawn from either errors or outright lies, or simply things being swept aside. Several of Andy's later posts are ignored, as is the amount he doubled down. Him using the official proton accounts to call his statements the official proton stance is waved away. It basically only examines the cleaned up, shiny final version of events proton would like you to pretend happened after they deleted everything, instead of what actually happened. Worse, it pretends that was the only chain of events that happened. It's straight up gaslighting.

It's a very, very biased article that doesn't even attempt to do any kind of deep analysis and just tries to justify its stance by cherry picking, instead of actually looking at the facts and coming to a conclusion from there.

It does make me feel a little better, but the fact that they doubled down and hasn't gone out to clarify make me really disappointed. Because they are a non profit foundation makes it a bit more secure also.

First hint is already on the FrontPage:

We do expect you to understand how to use email and how to configure your DNS to use our service

Second hint, the very aggressive way their documentation is written with big font, repeating and slight threats. See https://mxroutedocs.com/dns/dnsrecords/

Third one, their refund policy in the FAQs:

We do not offer refunds. Please do not sign up unless you are comfortable with your choice.

And there are quite many people writing about their encounters online with them, like:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/rbwqew/mxroute_are_they_rude_on_purpose_whats_been_your/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/mxroute/comments/1b1nk52/one_of_the_worst_service/

And so on. If you can handle working in open source you can handle them too. They are very direct which is off putting for some people, but they care deeply about their customers.

It was the company’s official stance

The CEO is a big enough douche that I'll not migrate to them.

It was a stunt, by an idiot to try to gain favor with trump. He was probably trying for a cabinet position in his tech bro circle. If it's his intent, and he owns majority share, it's their intent.

If he doesn't own a majority share, they're all complicit

When PR rolled in to wash out the stain, he just ran is mouth about not being political, even though he was literally just political.

As far as the company goes, they outed an Activist, so they're not privacy first. They'll sell you up the river in a second if someone with any power or money asks.

They're private enough not to sell your data/eyes like google/microsoft (for now). I suspect if sony starts going after torrenters in this new world order we've got brewing, they wouldn't hesitate to out you.

Yeah fair. A big part of my interest in it is that it split from Opera Software through a staff buyout, which to me says the people working there and maintaining it care a touch more than some companies. From the literature I consumed when signing up they seemed very privacy forward, and as a Proton VPN user I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket should Proton turn out to be a honeypot. That all being said, I agree with your point that they are subject to a legal system that doesn’t put users first compared to other countries, though for anything really sensitive I’m not really sure I would be using email to begin with, particularly not one I use for general clear net personal communication like banking and such.