I'm looking for a good secure mail provider and would like to know what other people use here. Personally, I'm looking for a provider that is not too expensive and have a good anti-spam filter system.
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Thank you. I didn't know that one yet. It looks quite good.
Iām a long time satisfied user of Fastmail.
Depends on what you call secure and what else you want too. Protonmail for instance is not expensive if you also want to use a good (proton) VPN, password manager, cloud drive, crypto manager etc. For spam mail filtering, if Protonmail isn't good enough, you can still use free Gmail too and forward it to your Proton account. Google has a good spam filter and this way you have a double filter.
(Besides, security remains also, or mostly, in our head: knowing how to recognize phisting mails ... etc.)
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I was actually considering protonmail, especially because of the privacy/security aspect. What puts me off a bit is the whole ecosystem. I don't particularly like putting mail, password manager, VPN, cloud storage, etc. all under the same provider.
Gmail might have a good spam filter but it also analyzes the contents of the emails. There is no real privacy there. And i agree that knowing how to recognize phishing mails etc. is important. But that doesn't make the provider's filtering any less important. No matter how careful you are, I'd rather have a good filter remove as much spam and malicious mail as possible before it even reaches my inbox.
I could add, that indeed it not only depends on what you call secure, but also in how you look at the modern world. E.g. if you believe Google's analysis of email content (something they openly say they do) would be used against you by some bad actor, then avoid Google; if you believe (as I do) that such big companies do that simply for performative advertising purposes and that's how we can get free and fast email, they you'll have no problem using Google. It's about trust, but also about our ability to trust, our mindset about how "the West" functions.
Proton, of course, is not an American company. It's a Swiss company - I may trust it more, as I am an European. However, Swiss govt threatened Proton's security guarantees a while ago, by demanding access to undecrypted content when they deemed it necessary. Proton's reaction was instant: a move of the involved parts of their data to another country (Germany, I think - the country where also the Filen cloud data manager was developed - with full encryption guarantees). This immediately restored trust for Proton's worried customers.
Regarding spam, I don't know who has the best filter. I also have Kaspersky scanning my email. You can combine several possibilities. Ultimately, all those security guys should better cooperate. Many already do (they already use certain centralized repositories of virus-signatures, if I am well informed). Ultimately, AI will also get better at recognizing spam and phisting mails, I suppose. (Unfortunately, AI in the hands of bad actors will get better at creating credible spam and phisting mails too... The endless circle of life and death 
)
If you don't need a single and "easy" email address for your business, you might get away without any spam filtering by using "plus addressing". This is a term for putting a tag at the end of your email account name, which gives you a somewhat unlimited amount of "virtual" email addresses for a single account.
GMail for example allows for that with the "+" character and with additional "." (dots) in the name as well: These are all the same email accounts, appearing to the outside world as different:
bobsmith@gmail.com
bob.smith@gmail.com
b.o.b.smith@gmail.com
bob.smith+amazon@gmail.com
If you make consistent use of the "+" character (or whatever it is at your provider) when providing an email address to your phone company, paypal, forum registration and so on, you will receive spam with a "To:" address like this: bob.smith+fitness-forum@gmail.com
You instantly know that you can put this email address onto your blocklist and you even know where your email got "lost" or who sold your email to malicious people.
In case you can adjust the tag-separation character, not using "+" is recommended. Spam senders are not dumb, they can strip the obvious tag part away and target your main account directly.
So, the perfect email provider allows for "plus addressing" and a setting for the tag separation character to make it really stealthy. If you run an email client which allows to edit your "Sender address" dynamically as well, you can even do real conversations over specific email addresses with specific, regular people (some wonder tough, why their name is part of the email address I write from.. o).
I run this "setup" for around 15 years, my inbox is clean without a single spam filter in place.
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Gmail works great.
Gmail might have a good spam filter but it also analyzes the contents of the emails. There is no real privacy there.
How do other email providers train and adjust their spam filters, and how do these spam filters work? You will not like the answer 
They all contain your data in plain text and analyze every your email. Some of them are sent to human review after "anonimization".
A lot of people got screwed by believing to "trust me bro" statements from all these security oriented services.
It gives you a false sense of security that only increases the chance that you get into trouble.
"Privacy" is a very broad statement. If you really have specific concerns, you need to make the threat model and then search for an email provider that can explain to you how exactly they gurantee you the properties that you need.
All serious companies that care about privacy host everything on premises like Apple (they even host Anthropic AI on their premises) or they physically air gap security critical parts and don't allow anyone to bring even their own pencil to the facility.
Be careful with that. You are talking about companies who easily fire 10 thousand of people just for fun. And many of these people are on H1B visas, which means that their life is basically ruined.
If they can do that to their own employees, it is hard to believe that they would think twice before throwing you under the bus.