Not read through your entire post yet (still busy), but regarding your point: “Slightly misleading to conflate privacy policies of the Website, of their mail service, and of their VPN to be one and the same.”
Seems you missed the point. I raised a question about whether the IP addresses of users logging into Proton Mail (it appears Proton’s privacy policy reserves them the right to log addresses) can be married up with the actual IP addresses of their users who rely on Proton VPN for privacy.
Whether Tuta logs IP address or not, if the user has Proton VPN, assumedly that degree of separation provides the user some protection?
Therefore, my question is (if it was not clear): might it be considered safer to use Tuta email if sticking with Proton VPN, rather than stick all our eggs in the Proton basket?
Read this from Tuta (the reason for my original questions):
“…you might still want to keep your IP address hidden even from us, which is why we will never add a VPN or a browser to our offer. Offering a VPN does not make any sense. Because if we did, we as the email provider would still be able to find out the users’ original IP addresses, if the connection were to be made via this VPN. For privacy reasons, it is better to keep the two services separated.”
P.S. Not everyone here are experts. Some are at the beginning of their journey and are seeking advice.