Personal email services provide an inbox, calendar and contacts for individuals and families. Besides correspondence, the mailbox quietly becomes the record of a person's online life: receipts, bookings, tax and bank letters, and the password-reset messages for almost every other account. Gmail, Outlook.com and iCloud Mail are the familiar reference points.
That makes the choice of provider more consequential than it looks. Whoever runs the mailbox can in principle read stored messages unless they are encrypted so that only you hold the key, so it matters what the provider actually encrypts, and what it cannot encrypt, such as sender and recipient metadata. A free service is usually paid for with data or advertising, while a paid service has a business model that does not depend on your content. Your address is also a lock-in anchor: changing it means updating every account that uses it.
When looking at a European option, consider whether you can use your own domain, so that the address stays yours if you move. Check support for standard protocols and clients, export and import tools, how the provider describes its encryption in its documentation, and what happens to the account and data if you stop paying or leave.