> what does Protonmail offer in terms of privacy that is better than GMail or Outlook, given that USA and Swiss are both adhere to democratic standards.

Well for a start the privacy policy of Gmail allows them to use your data for advertising purposes.

Secondly, emails encrypted at rest, are still encrypted, so at least the body is protected.

Unless you were receiving emails that were encrypted prior to being sent that wouldn't be the case with Gmail.

The threat model for Protonmail is fairly clearly defined under the "ProtonMail recommended use cases". https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/

The fact still remains email was probably not the right tool for these people as there is a lot of data stored server side.

> what does Protonmail offer in terms of privacy that is better than GMail or Outlook

Encryption. That was always the point. Your emails are stored encrypted, and nobody can read their content except you.

Not sure why some people expected ProtonMail to act as a magical VPN, both truly anonymous and not obeying to any court order, to an unencrypted email account like Gmail.

The difference, I guess, is that someone wouldn't start protonmail in the US precisely because of this. If Swiss laws changed for the worse, they might consider changing their country of operations.

Comparing the USA to Switzerland is truly naive. The Switzerland doesn’t have a permanent occupation of another sovereign country where Switzerland subjected prisoners to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, not to mention other routine human rights abuse violations. And let’s not forget that proton doesn’t have the same record of customer abuse as google.

Countries override democratic standards for vaguely defined "national interests" all the time. It so happens that US, with its sprawling global empire, has a lot more "national interests" than the generally MYOB Swiss, and so is more prone to such abuse.