Wishing to avoid ads, I specified "paid" in the subject line. There are very good free email providers that are Ad-free that are also worth supporting with a paid subscription.
Two of the top of my head are Fastmail and Mailfence: https://mailfence.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/ "Richard, How about gmail? Or proton mail <https://proton.me/mail>?" Gmail has Ads. Protonmail doesn't support POP / IMAP client connections but it's Ad-free, they do have free accounts, I use one, but they're also an organization very much worthy of supporting with a paid subscription.
