My webmail solution of choice, for quite a few years now, has been Fastmail. Their interface / design / ergonomics are lightweight, responsive, efficient and -- in my view -- Just Work. (They were owned by Opera for a while, largely I think because of their massive levels of expertise in making mail fast, simple and efficient, but are independent again now.)

So my various email addresses -- gmail, yahoo, outlook, so forth -- are all fetched from their providers into Fastmail (which also allows me to set aliases to the addresses I own so I don't have to interact with anything I don't enjoy interacting with!)

The downside: although there IS a free offering, you'll probably want one or other of their paid accounts.

The web end is good, they support several forms of 2FA if that's your thing (I have a yubico key but they have several other alternatives) there are mobile apps too... I don't evangelise them as much as I should but I've tried a lot of webmail solutions over the years and nothing else comes close.

And does it matter which browser you use? Apparently not. Fastmail lives up to its name, generally.

I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, I agree that forcing paid upgrades by stealth is, on the face of it, a sharp practice. However, expecting the supplier to keep downloadable copies of your specific version of the installation media for free, indefinitely, just in case you might have the need to reinstall (and bear in mind that GS-Base can be installed portably and therefore reinstalled just by copying it on from your backup, what do you mean you don't have a backup?  ;)) seems a touch unreasonable too.

And while it's certainly the case that a $10 / year "subscription" isn't exactly free, even ignoring the fact that you only have to pay it if you want new functionality after the first year or you didn't keep backups, for a piece of software that can do what this does for the price remains pretty remarkable. The developer is responsive to requests for new features and bugfixes, to a greater extent than most commercial software I've ever encountered.

I grant you might not see the appeal over -- say -- various spreadsheet programs that pretend some database functionality but this is the only (reasonably) affordable and user-friendly "proper" database program I've seen in a very long time. (I've used Lotus Approach for a long, long time but I can't make it run on a 64-bit PC -- there are things I miss about Approach but GS-Base ticks more boxes than anything else I've tried.) So I'm consequently inclined to be a little more forgiving than I might if it were operating in a more crowded arena :)

That made me wonder whether the CAPTCHA wasn't deliberately off-putting, to dissuade casual use of the forum.

There may be some truth in that. I registered on the Citadel5 forum in May 2014 and found the captcha so hard that I had to ask in email (to [email protected]) for the account to be created for me. It's not a very busy forum. Can't think why... :)

I do get the impression that Jarek is a sole operator and might believe that managing a busy forum might take more time than he wants to devote to it. At least emailed requests from known users is likely to keep noise down.