Marcel made several references to the very high volume of support requests and how it contributed to the problem.

Indeed, I would donate again were Marcel to continue development via pure sideloading. FairEmail is REALLY REALLY good.

He talks about users expectations and unfair reviews a bit in a few comments on that page, I imagine there's more I didn't read

This is what I was referring to. Thank you for clarifying.

Please read his comments. He is overwhelmed and I wouldn’t be surprised if he even felt abused. Users (especially free tier) can be (more often than not) nasty towards developers.

If it he doesn't want to "feel abused" maybe he should not have been shipping people's contact lists off to a third party without their knowledge or permission while claiming to be a privacy-oriented application?

Could you provide the source code where this is supposed to be happening? I see the favicons being discussed, and the source clearly shows requests only made to domains: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/master/app/src/main/j...

This is certainly not "shipping people's contact lists off to a third party". Is there somewhere else this is happening or are you mistaken?

I'd argue choosing to use PlayStore for downloading Apps is already abuse. It's negligience towards the creators.

On the other hand you don't need to put your app there, except for maybe if you want to attract some users./s