Fastmail

Fastmail is email the way it should work. It is private in the way most people need: you pay a subscription, so there are no ads, no scanning of your mail to profile you, and no selling your data. It is simple: a fast, clean inbox with calendar and contacts, your own domain if you want one, and Masked Email, which gives every site its own throwaway address you can switch off the moment it leaks or starts spamming. And it is built on open standards. IMAP means any mail app on any device works with your account, and JMAP, the modern open protocol Fastmail designed and published through the IETF as RFC 8620 and RFC 8621, does the same job faster and more efficiently on phones. Standards are what keep you free: your mail is not locked inside one company's app, you can pick the client you trust, and you can take everything with you if you ever leave. Fastmail also maintains the open-source Cyrus IMAP server it runs on. The trade-off is that mail is encrypted at rest but not end-to-end, so Fastmail itself can read it. It is an Australian company, subject to the Assistance and Access Act it publicly opposed, and you choose at signup whether your mail is stored in the US or the EU (Amsterdam), though even EU accounts keep a live copy, backups and logs in the US. If the provider must not be able to read your mail, choose Proton or Tuta.