Perhaps I’ll stick with fastmail. I’m cautious of the non standard proton email requiring bridge and possibly making backup much harder.
O decisions decisions!
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I would suggest three reasons beyond encryption benefits, which I find invaluable. Firstly, spam filter. I have received zero spam using protonmail, it’s fantastic, whereas my apple email is constantly plagued with spam from a pawned account from years ago… Secondly, the ability to create unique aliases which can be a complete different name, yes apple does this now too but it’s a bit more fiddly to set up. Finally, the use of SimpleLogin with protonmail, gives you the ability to create random email addresses for junk accounts etc. Yes apple now also has a hide my email function for Apple Plus so that erodes this point to some degree.
I have few contacts that use protonmail, hence the encryption benefit is negligible for email but the protection of data on server, and features above make it worthwhile. Finally, I opted for a business account which gives access to ProtonVpn.
Each to their own, but I find it’s worth the cost to me. I keep basic personal admin to my iCloud email and use Proton for all the commercial and international sites, which gives me a nice separation between the two domains.
Hope that helps.
Cheers
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Is this any better than fastmail which offers the same?
In my experience Fastmail’s masked email is easier to use than Simplelogin, and both services have fantastic spam filtering.
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Sorry never used fast mail.
But of course a lawsuit can compel YOU to hand over the contents. For that not to happen, you’d have to believe that going to jail for obstruction was worse than your email contents being revealed. And if they know that Joe Bad Guy sent you emails, they can subpoena his provider and get his side, along with anything he quoted from your emails. 
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I think the old adage applies here: If it’s online it’s not private. This seems to apply no matter how secure you attempt to make it as there are too many variables.
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Absolutely, this is one of the reasons why I’ve never understood individuals who keep every single email they’ve ever sent or received, legal requirements notwithstanding.
My personal email habits were set in the late 80’s - my first personal email account which came with a whopping 128k of server storage. Ever since my hardwired habit has been to read, reply if necessary, and then delete messages - I treat email & texting as ephemeral communications.
That said, I do archive, offline, about 20 to 30 messages a year for things like warranties and such, but review and delete them once a year if no longer relevant.
YMMV
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That makes me realise that I archive way too many emails!
EDIT
There is a school of thought that says with cheap storage it’s better never to delete.
I don’t know that I’d ever heard that as “better”, but I’ve definitely heard “there’s no need.”
But that’s an opinion on a different issue. “Do I need to spend the time figuring out what to save or what to delete?” is the relevant question there. We’re discussing long-term security and privacy.
If you plot the Venn diagram of the people that believe “there’s no need to ever delete email” and the people that believe that email privacy is super-important, I would wager the circles don’t touch.
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When Gmail was introduced in 2004 it didn’t have a Delete button. Today I use server side rules to keep routine messages out of my Inbox and delete the majority of them after review.
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Been using Fastmail for years. 
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Moved from Fastmail to iCloud Mail 2 weeks ago, including 3 domains.
Not directly related to the topic, but iCloud supports encrypting mail at rest on Apple Servers, which can only be decrypted by your devices. (Advanced Data Protection)
Besides privacy, costs have been my motivation to switch.
For real privacy you need encrypted mail content, as previously said. And this can be done with any mail provider, because encryption will happen on the sending device and decryption on receiving device.
See SMime or GPG.
But, this will not work with your family or companies when they do not setup this stuff correctly.
I have a few “nerdy” friends which are able to setup GPG so we do end to end encryption.
Could be that ProtonMail provides this automatically when mails are send from and ProtonMail account to another ProtonMail account.
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According to the chart n this Apple document, even with ADP enabled Apple retains the keys and can decrypt email, calendars, and contacts stored on iCloud servers.
Proton uses the same PGP encryption that GnuPG uses and can exchange encrypted mail with non Proton accounts that are set up to send and receive PGP messages.
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