FastMail with your own domain. Few bucks a month. No creepy motive for them to mine your data. Reliable service. No bullshit & fast user interface.

No affiliation, just another customer.

Funnily enough this came up yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574

I'm quite happy using ProtonMail.

I don't use email _that_ heavily, so I'm on their free plan and that's just fine for me.

(www.protonmail.com)

I've also been using ProtonMail since the beginning of last year and neither a heavy mail user, but need it still. I'm paying for it and using my own domain. Some things to consider:

1) The web UI is probably not very nice and snappy if you use email a lot.

2) No IMAP for Linux (still).

3) If you happen to be like me (a bit of an idiot sometimes) and lock your phone so you don't get access to your authenticator AND you forgot the security keys, all your old emails will be PGP garbage from now on.

4) The Android app is a bit so-so... Bugs happen.

The good parts are it works, doesn't spy on you, encrypts everything client-side and is based in Switzerland outside of US and EU jurisdiction.

Really, the most important thing is to control the domain, so that changing the provider later is not a big deal. I've been using FastMail and it is great, but the hardest part was moving away from @gmail.com

If you just want pure email, migadu.com works very well. I like the fact that they price based on emails sent, not domains or addresses. This lets me run a different domain with a regex based catchall for account registrations so that my personal inbox remains clean. They do require you to purchase your own domain but you should do that anyway to ensure that a provider can't lock you out of your digital life.

I can drop a vouch in for Protonmail. Been using them for a bit over a year now. They also recently added full PGP integration, with the ability to assign public keys to contacts, as well as the ability to use your own private key.

mailbox.org and fastmail seem to be popular alternatives.