It’s not going to randomly disappear your data, but I don’t particularly trust it either. As with anything, keep to a back up strategy. As far as efficiency goes, if you bear in mind it is still a VM but with most of the configuration hidden away for a simpler experience, I would say it is more convenient than a VM under virtualbox or vmware player, especially if you have no need for a full linux desktop environment.

Pretty much. It’s hyper-v under the hood giving you a linux VM that’s integrated just enough to keep up some sort of linux workflow. I’m happy to shit on it as much as the next person, but for many who are locked into a ms corporate ecosystem because work policy, it’s a decent little window in your jail cell.

Never has there been a more fitting username with a comment. It’s so true. I would hop over to another more future proof solution in a heart beat if it existed. This is all compounded by the fact that once you learn the quirks and get it in a good place you start not minding it so much. It’s somewhere between sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome.

Startmail (from the Startpage folks) has been fine for me. You pay for it, you can put your domain on it, you can do alias addresses, works with any IMAP client since it’s just IMAP ran by a (so far) competent company. Their web ui is fine, but ive only used it for initial setup. Besides Thunderbird on mobile I use Snappymail within Nextcloud and this works just fine as well. All I can say is it does what it says on the tin.