Don’t use local providers
 

There are some local huge providers,
Such as GMX, mail.ru, yahoo japan etc.
Don’t use them if you are not from those locations.
Even though you can sign up them successfully,
After you use them for some time,
They most probably require you to provide local identity for verification,
Such as bank account, passport, local telephone etc.
Surely you don’t have those data, then you lost access to them.
I lost some accounts due to above reason, including:

3 yahoo japan
1 GMX.net
1 mail.de
1 UKR.net

Just sucks!

Interestingly, I still manage to keep my @ukr.net address although I'm not a local. But thanks for the reminder I will never use it for anything serious from now on.

OTOH, there are many providers that seem to welcome business from outside their countries. Some that jump to mind include Fastmail (Australia), Migadu (Swiss), Proton (Swiss), Runbox (Norway), etc. Some TLDs require an address in the country, like jp, but I don't think most do. Why the difference?

I think this has to do with recent laws/agreements, courts, jurisdiction over possible offenses, holding providers accountable, etc. ?

I lost a Yahoo Japan account.

I should go with out saying, that includes local ISP's. Are there any local ISP's that still provide email? None that I am aware of here in the Philippines.

My side:

• mail.co.uk
• mail.de
• mail.ch
• mail.fr

They suspended my accounts without offering a reason and provided me the opportunity to appeal and download the email.

It sounds unimportant, but I have found that when you need customer service it is very helpful if it is located in your same time zone. That is one reason why using a provider in your own country can be helpful. In the distant past when FM responded quickly to customer service issues the lag in response was increased a lot because they were based in Australia and I was on the opposite side of the world. Of course, it is rare today to have any provider with customer service that responds quickly, so maybe that no longer matters.

In the early days when it was only Jeremy and Rob running FM they usually hired someone in a very different timezone to help with CS in America and Europe.

In the past I managed to sign up for mail.co.uk and mail.fr, but it's long ago since I last checked these accounts, so they may be gone by now. I refrained from GMX and web.de despite hearing a lot of good feedback exactly because of these reasons: they required a German IP to sign up and even though I could have signed up when visiting Germany I didn't feel like it was worth the hassle and the worries of maybe losing the accounts afterwards. Continuity is a big deal for me.

Hence, for free email, I'd restrict myself to international services like Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo, and to local (= Belgian) providers like mail.be.

You cannot compare Protonmail or Fastmail or Runbox to free providers like Jeff mentioned. Proton, Fastmail and Runbox are paid email services, so the logic is that they will accept customers from everywhere as long as they pay the bills. Proton does have free accounts too, but given their mission of providing privacy-sensitive email to anyone it is only logical that they provide their services to users outside of Switzerland too (and they have their paid accounts to keep their services going).

I wouldn't touch mail.ru or yandex.ru with a long pole as long as the situation in Russia doesn't change. Despite good comments about the services themselves, I don't feel like a lot of hassle or rejected emails simply because of the ccTLD.

Don't confuse domain ownership with email accounts. Some ccTLD's require local presence (including some widely used ones such as .eu, .us, .au, .ca ...) but if the domain owner is in the right country to buy and own the domain, the domain owner is free to give away email accounts to anyone. As long as the domain owner(s) is/are in the right jurisdiction, they are free to give email accounts under that domain to anyone they wish.

ukr.net is OK

I'm confused, because I'd never consider something like GMX to be "local" to me in the U.S.

But I'm stunned that anyone in their right mind would provide bank information as ID.

Strato.de does require.

Regarding GMX, I have a gmx.com account, no issues.

It's the gmx.net account the requires a German locale.