For a while now I have been looking for email providers that are transparent and meet EFF standards, and in fact, I went to the EFF website to see if there was an article about email providers, but found nothing, the only decent providers I could find on my own, have been tutanota and cock.li, I am currently using tutanota and was planning to move everything to cock. li, but unfortunately it hasn’t been going through its best moment, I would stay with tutanota if it wasn’t for one thing, and that is that it can’t be used inside thunderbird, there is a plugin that allows you to open a window with tutanota, but that’s not the idea, ideally you would be able to add your email address without any external plugin, and that is why I am asking for recommendations that meet the standards mentioned above, but that is also compatible with thunderbird to be able to save the emails locally, any client can download the emails to be able to have them locally, but that is the one I use personally.
For privacy specifically take a look at https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/ .
For just a paid provider where you are the customer not the product, consider FastMail or a hosting offering such as NameCheap. By hosting I mean the one that is part of their hosting plans not their email specific offering though that is interesting also but quite expensive.
Fast mail is not recommended anymore. Not because of them. But because of the Aus govt. check out the access and assistance bill passed a few years ago now
I had the idea of creating an email server in the future, but everyone I told that to told me it was a terrible idea.
Server no. But hosted domain email is probably what I will do in the next year. Probably at Fastmail or at Namecheap. I have the domain just waiting.
In a way, I already have a mail server on my VPS, just never installed IMAP. Not what I want for every day though.