I used mailbox.org for several years until they forced everyone into more expensive plans by adding irrelevant features like office and cloud storage. This kind of behaviour from them was disappointing.

Can only recommend them - not too expensive, you can also use your own domains and they support at-rest auto encryption of all incoming mail with a PGP public key you give them (which of course does not prevent them from saving incoming mail as clear text somewhere else, but prevents others from reading all existing mail should they get access to your mailbox later)

Discovered them recently. Price looks absolutely fair for what you get. It offers up to ten external addresses for sending and has a web interface so it looks like a solid Gmail alternative.

I think German law makes that impossible - basically you need to assume the government can access your data at any time.

I thought EU privacy laws were better than US laws.

The difference is that in the US, it will sweep it up anyway, and in the EU, it can access it only with a court order.