Kodachrome

Your boundaries on cost make it tough, but aside from Tuta you might have a look at mail.ee which has very basic features (no E2EE for example) and a retro web UI, but very high storage limits. They offer free accounts too, and support SMTP/IMAP/POP3. It’s Latvian-based so comes with the “100% GDPR compliance” feature if that’s of interest.

Zoho.com is another that comes to mind. It’s very feature-heavy/slick (you can tell they’re attempting to market mainly to small businesses looking for a cheaper Google Workspace), has been around a long time and I’ve read positive comments from others about the service. It’s an Indian company though so you don’t get GDPR protections (or similar) as far as I know. The low-end plans are in your price range and I think they still offer a free plan - that’s what I have anyway.

I’ve been a Fastmail customer for decades now and it’s exactly what I want a mail service to be, but it’s out of your price range and has no free tier.

skiff.com might be worth a look. Its services are E2EE. Its a lot like Proton in spirit but with better pricing and less nickle-and-diming. 10G of storage on the free plan. It’s not a Swiss company though, if that should happen to be important to you.

If you think scambaiting is good entertainment and you’ve somehow not come across Lenny, today’s your lucky day:
https://www.youtube.com/@ToaoDotNet/videos

It’s gonna be wonderful to watch the Lennys of the world become increasingly more sophisticated/human-seeming and less random.

It’s annoying AF, much like the habit of people posting comments consisting of “Based” all over the place in recent times. The latter is dying down fortunately, and I hope the R meme meets a quick and painful death very soon.

The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.