Hi just wanted to share these 2 links, since others have already answered your question:
Links should help you decide what to use for other apps as well.
I personally use Mullvad since I don’t need port fowarding, but it does come with full IPv6 support.
Aside from the commonly stated - experience:
The key point to keep in mind is that, at the end of the day, your building an application to satisfy a customer. Or to be exact, a list of requirements that may or may not be constantly changing. In this case from what i’m reading, I am assuming its your hobby project, so the ‘customer’ is you.
In this case, over-engineering is when you add more functionalities/services than what you needed to hit the bare minimum requirement. Ideally you want to hit basic requirements first, then start designing/engineering on top of what you have when your customer wants more features, etc.
Your design providing more features than the bare minimum should be an ‘accident’ more than intentional ideally, unless you think the extra feature takes 0% effort to implement. (Though TBH safe rule of thumb is, never design for additional unrequested features)
With the above context in mind, you should be asking the questions:
Yea, welcome to client engineering. Usually its handled by senior developers or project managers, unless your in startup.
TLDR; It’s not about finding a design that is perfect, its about finding a design that is acceptable by the involved. What is acceptable? that is for the involved parties to decide.
Use this tool to debloat your windows: https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla , also, I heard that setting your region as English (International) during installation comes with less bloat-ware installed?
Also, lookup tutorials on how to Dual Boot.
Can consider using more than 1 email application. Or using Firefox’s containers and access your email service via web (opening the tabs to your email service only when needed).
If you want to prevent IP triangulation stuff, can consider stuff like Port Master or network namespace (if Linux). Idea is that you will run different email applications for different email accounts, and each application will pass through a different VPN tunnel.
Honestly like what others said, I would look towards email aliasing. I usually recommend email aliasing for any activity which you know it would be for a read-only email (ingress/incoming).
Egress/Outgoing is harder to recommend unless its extremely informal or its used to reply to bots.
This way its harder to triangulate your activities through email, as each account uses a unique email alias.