Sounds like a good time to switch to linux. FREE
Thunderbird is a good email client aka replacement for Outlook. Runs on windows, mac or linux. Thunderbird is made by Mozilla, same people as firefox so I don’t know if they steal data or not. There’s a few different email clients specifically for linux too. FREE
I use PIA (private internet access) for a VPN. I pay annually which works out to $3.50/mth.
I run used Thinkpads. Many of their models/series are designed and built for large corporate leases and they’re very reliable. I’m running a Thinkpad W530 right now. It has an Intel Core i7 - 2.70GHz processor and 16gb of ram and I haven’t been able to bog it down, even with graphics editing programs. It came with two 128GB SSD hard drives and win7 Pro preinstalled. I installed linux next to windows and can choose which one I want to start during computer startup. I paid $255.00 for it. It’s only got a 15.4 inch display. Something with a 17 inch would probably cost $300-350. T series, W series and P series, oldest to newest, are all “business class”. I opted for a high performance W series instead of going with the newer P series, mainly because I would have paid a higher price for the equivalent performance in a P series and the W530 I got originally came with Win7 so I knew it would run 7 well and I have no intention of running Win 8 or 10.
I use pretty much only linux on this particular laptop, I never get on windows. On another laptop and also a tablet I have, I run windows for a couple of programs that don’t have a linux equivalent. The windows side never connects to the internet though. All that gets done on the linux side as it’s safer. The viruses, malware, spyware etc are all written to attack windows machines as that’s what most people are running.
I’m running Linux Mint KDE Edition which sadly, they won’t be building anymore. Support runs out in 2021 but I could run it for a few years after that as updates will still be available. KDE has a program called KDE Connect for connecting to a smart phone and some other distrobutions aka flavors of linux have the same. FREE.
Another FREEper uses Zorin operating system which is linux made to look like windows.
For a new smart phone, you pretty much have two choices. Apple iPhone or an Android (made by google) based phone.
All phone apps want too many permissions to access different features of the phone(camera, microphone, etc and your personal data. No such thing as privacy with a smart phone but I think the iPhone is better about it than Andriod phones. The iPhone is pricey though.
I buy all my laptops used from ebay.
RE: IMAP vs POP email. Some email services only provide IMAP but even though the default is for the emails to be kept on a server somewhere, you can set it up to download them.
IF you really want privacy for email, you could get a domain name, like mychickensoupemail.com and set up an email address like soup@mychickensoupemail.com
At any rate, you can only encrypt outgoing email. You can’t encrypt an email that someone else is sending you, naturally. Even with that protonmail, both parties have to be using protonmail for emails back and forth to be encrypted. You can set up thunderbird or most any email client to send encrypted but it does take some setting up.
For all you want, you’re either going to have to have someone come to you or bring/send your computer to them as a lot of it needs to be done on the machine.
Linux also has MS Office compatible programs FREE. Equivalents of MS Word, MS Access, MS Excel etc. FREE
did I mention linux is FREE
Oh, you can put ubuntu touch(mobile aka phone OS) on a Nexus 5 phone but it’s a pretty techie thing to do.
https://ubports.com/devices/nexus5-convergence
that is what I need, a pretty techie person who can do it all or most. a comptuer geek who also is a phone geek and is able to pull together the best OS and email providers so I can function pretty seamlessly. and not in the cloud.
Is there a certain kind of person who can do that?