Technology
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Can you explain what you mean when you say email OTP is somewhat pointless?
Email is commonly compromised. It's an easy target for bad actors executing a takeover.
SMS also isn't that hard to compromise either. I can at least put email behind real 2FA, so they'd have to somehow intercept the email to break email 2FA. I can't do that with SMS, I'm at the mercy of carriers, who obviously don't care.
The email protocol, SMTP, was originally not designed with encrypting content in mind. Encryption was added years later, but as an option that is negotiated between mail servers.
While large email providers like Gmail, outlook, etc. likely all support encryption as best as they can, all it takes is one misconfigured server, etc. to cause emails to be sent in clear text at least part of the way from location to another.
It’s largely for that reason why a lot of people & organizations don’t trust email to be secure unless you use mail clients that encrypt and decrypt mail at both ends. But that’s a PITA to set up properly and manage.
If your email is sent entirely within an ecosystem like Gmail then it’s likely encrypted the entire time. But as soon as it passes outside of Gmail to another organization there’s no guarantee it’s still secure. These days it probably is, as virtually every reputable internet provider & company is going to take the issue seriously, but there’s still the history of SMTP not being encrypted that haunts those in the security fields.
SMS has the same problem though. It's only marginally safer because the tools to hijack a cellular session are a bit more complicated to use, but they are widely available and you can find plenty of instructions online on how to use maybe $3k worth of equipment to spoof a GSM base station and force a target device onto it. Hell, in some cases you don't even have to force the target device onto your rogue ENB - you can just jam the phone and hijack the number through your own SIP gateway if you get the timing right.
Because Two-Factor Authentication is generally supposed to be under the principle of "Something you have and something you know", the password being the "know", and using a TOTP on an app via your phone would be the "have" (the phone).
I suppose if your email is restricted to the something you have/know it's a bit better, and certainly better than nothing - but not by much.
Alternatively, if your e-mail provider does offer a more secure 2FA solution, then sending a temporary code to your e-mail address would be a valid 2FA method by proxy. So it's not entirely a bad idea. (Although I've yet to see an e-mail provider that enforces 2-factor)
Protonmail. I dont have a backup email registered for recovery so if i loose my password and 2fa im totally fucked
Same, which is why I use a password manager and periodically take encrypted backups. The average person isn't going to do that, but I like having the option to use email 2FA instead of SMS, since I can make email 2FA pretty secure, but I can't do that for SMS.