I remember I used to have the same problem when I was using Proton Pass aliases.

IIRC, by default Proton Pass uses the passmail.net alias. I fixed it by using another Proton Pass alias (I think it was the passmail.com one)

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/california-kimberly-clark-warehouse-fire-suspect-bragged-prosecutors-say/

I took a similar path as you, but everything basically happened in the span of less than one month.

I used to have two mail inboxes, my personal gmail address and my student address. I wanted to degoogle my setup, so I decided to switch to Proton Mail. I already had Proton Pass and Proton VPN (I started these subscriptions just a week before), so I decided to do the Proton Unlimited 2-year plan.

I liked both Proton Mail and Pass. I forwarded all my mails from my two other inboxes to my Proton address, and in the Proton mail client i sorted everything with folders and labels. Proton Pass was the biggest QOL improvement I had. I used to use the basic iCloud password manager, which sucks. You can only add login credentials and the firefox extension never worked.

But after 20 days I decided to cancel the subscription and get a refund. I had just bought a minipc, which since then I use as a self-hosting server. I still need to setup a Drive alternative, but I already self-host Immich (Google Photos replacement) and Vaultwarden (password manager). I haven't tackled email self-hosting (as you and the other user said already, it's a big commitment), so I use Migadu as my email hosting provider for my domain.

It's very cheap (I got a 50% student discount too), but they are some daily limits, even though I never reached them. They're also very transparent about the pros and cons of their service which is nice :)

The only proton service I still use is the VPN, since it has port forwarding.

I had to change my SL aliases to my domain aliases, but atleast it wasn't that time consuming since I had proton unlimited for just a few weeks.

do you mind expanding on why it sucks?

I don't selfhost lemmy, but I was thinking about it