At least of the last time I looked around (within the past year), it's the only major cloud-based option that isn't ad-supported, but does offer all the extra goodies like calendars.
Take a look at posteo.de for ad-free email with a strong focus on privacy. It’s also way cheaper than the lowest plan that Fastmail has. Posteo is a private company, doesn’t take investor funding and has been profitable.
There are a couple of things I don’t like about Posteo (as a customer):
1. It recycles deleted addresses/aliases after six months and makes them avaiufor someone else to claim and use. Ideally, this should be never done to protect customers. Fastmail also recycles deleted addresses/emails within a few months (sooner than Posteo does, IIRC).
2. It provides only two aliases in the base pricing and additional aliases (if many are required) will increase the cost. Fastmail provides 600 aliases in every plan! So if you’re heavy on aliases, Fastmail would be cheaper.
Other providers similar to this that I haven’t subscribed to, but you can read up on or try, are mailfence (has a free plan as well), runbox and mailbox.org. All of them have been around for quite sometime and also provide IMAP access (which is important if you want to migrate email content from one provider to another).
Author here, thank you for the alternatives suggestions! I have edited the post and included them. I did not want the article to look like an ad for Fastmail by any means
