Even earlier than that there was the killbind. Nothing beats your teammate or opponent finding you in an unfortunate or unexpected moment, taunting as you killbind shortly before they killbind themselves.

That’s why I enjoyed TF2 for such a long time. While teamwork will always give you an advantage in matches, you will nearly never find it on public matches and people just do their own thing, and occasionally see a push forming and join in to get further. It also helps that the TTK in TF2 is much longer than in other team based multiplayer games, and you spawn back into it within 10 seconds or so.

Sadly there are so few games that follow that formula of goofy fun and rather just try to make games that are “strategic” or “competitive”, which sucks majorly.

I’m not sure about the Proton thing, but yeah, Mailbox sets up PGP for you at server-level, which means they are still unencrypted on the server but will always be sent encrypted.

The initial mode is that they will try to negotiate whether PGP is supported by the other side, with you having the option to always use it for the price of the opposite side having to encrypt them.

You can even enforce it on a case by case basis by adding “secure.” To the mailbox.org domain, however I don’t know if that is also possible when using your own domain.

A big difference (for some) is that the mailbox is not fully encrypted. However I only see that as a requirement if there is an actual potential threat against you (like as a journalist).

Also, Mailbox has app passwords, so you can control which applications can access it and a simple revocation will end it. Connecting directly is not possible for security reasons.

They also offer 25 free aliases, 50 additional ones if you use your own domain. And they do make it rather easy to set up the necessary records to send via your domain. Plus throwaway addresses (which will only exist for 90 days each and can only receive emails).