I dont need a smartphone, just email.
I made a new gmail acount with no problems.
Time to make all new forum profiles sooner or later.
They can hack my mail all they want, google can read all my mails no problem, as long as i can read the mail myself also.
You can obviously use it without a smartphone. You can even set it to require two normal passwords instead of just one.
It isn't as easy with these mailbox providers as you think. For example: Spam detection. Not of the mails in your in-box, but spam detection of your outgoing mail, in the in-box of your recipient.
Using this site
https://www.mail-tester.com/ we can test if our outgoing mails would be detected as spam. (SpamAssassin) You just send a usual mail, with subject and body (Needs more than one word in both. What words to use is irrelevant) to that email shown there, press check-your-score and read the result.
The result shown on this website is identically to what the result of the SpamAssassin validation of a mailbox provider would be. (If they use SpamAssassin. But it's Open Source, so, who doesn't?) The result would be something like "6.7/10". The lower the score out of ten - the "spam"ier your mails look to spam filters.
(Usually called "X-Spam-Status: No/1.4/5.0" in the source code of a received email, where "5,0" is the threshold at which a mail is considered spam. The threshold varies with provider. "1.4" is the actual score of your mail and "no" means it is lower than the threshold.)
With this I could determine that my old email provider (GMX) produces outgoing emails that sometimes have a rating way into spam. It is even listed in SORBS! (that is a IPv4 blacklist)
With protonmail however, all emails always rate 10/10. Because they care about that. They also care about not reading your emails and archiving it for making profit via advertisement. (Encrypted inbox, p2p and keys)
And it's free with no advertisements. It also has a paid version with your own domains like bumfights@funny.vid. So you're not even stuck with bumfights@protonmail.com or bumfights@pm.me (Which you'll also get for free).
And you get a free 7 day trial of one of the, if not the best VPN service out there.