[mosselman]

There are privacy conscious alternatives to the expensive providers such as proton. Mailbox.org is the one I went with, but there are others. Many provide inbox encryption through gpg. I could be very wrong, which I often am, but I believe that proton is also inbox encrypting like you would with gpg and their service is some sort of wrapper around that.

The downside to proton for me was price and having to use their client. There is an “imap-bridge” that you can run, but that feels hacky and in the end if I really wanted all that I could also opt into using the aforementioned providers with gpg inbox encryption.