I have found that is difficult to educate people/friends on the value of
private email.  Everyone seems to be happy offering their communications
content for free to gmail or facebook to gather and exploit.

On a brief mission to explore options, I discovered Protonmail a couple
years ago.  I gave it a very quick initial run:

Login success                  Apr 23, 2018 5:28:34 PM
Login failure (password)  Apr 24, 2018 1:04:15 AM

  ..until I screwed up remembering the password the next day! :)
Obviously, my easy-to-remember-password wasn't so easy to remember the
following day!

I was determined to remember it, at some point:

Login failure (password)  Apr 24, 2018 1:05:44 AM
Login failure (password)  Apr 24, 2018 11:11:14 AM
Login failure (password)  Apr 25, 2018 12:51:11 AM
Login failure (password)  Apr 25, 2018 12:51:31 AM

  ..and gave up, for a couple of years.

Login failure (password)  Jan 22, 2020 8:52:32 PM
Login success                  Jan 22, 2020 8:56:25 PM
Logout                          Jan 22, 2020 9:23:31 PM

  ..but I cheated this time with a pw reset.

I'm glad I'm back and didn't have to change my initial email address.

However, a pw reset does NOT allow access to previously store emails.
That, is actually a very smart decision. Should anyone commandeer your
pw recovery email address, they could request a pw reset. But once they
do that, your previous email content will be unavailable.

After my pw reset, I could see old emails listed, but the contents
remained encrypted and looked like this:

 - - -BEGIN PGP MESSAGE- - -
Version: ProtonMail

wcBMA1wsrvPuXdKzAQf/c4LqdtGNID0Y94iWbKZItljM5d5gwSPIV0OGWIpl
4ymH9P/iWBskKyFp6aKZ11n/qhflHMJBD14kpIgisXNFdwBNowN8no5jybxx

etc..

I encourage people to check out Protonmail.  It is OpenPGP-based. Their
service is accessible via Android or iOS apps, or a web-interface. It
automatically encrypts email, end-to-end, between protonmail users. But
it also offers to provide sending encrypted email to non-protonmail
users via web-access with a passphrase/clue that you communicate to your
recipient ahead of time.  Then, the recipient can compose a reply that
will maintain its encrypted quality - automatically. There is no
requirement for non-protonmail users to learn anything about gpg/pgp or
have gpg/pgp installed.

Outbound emails to non-protonmail users automatically expire within a month.

They offer 3 plan levels, but the FREE plan is a great place to start
for your friends to get a smooth introduction to private/encrypted email.

  ../|ug

--- Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (Windows/20100228)