Lori, I use two email providers, the Apple iCloud account that came with my Apple ID and one at Pobox.com, provided with webmail by fastmail. The advantage of Pobox is that they have a really good spam filter process, so I don't have to put up with spam. I get one email each day listing the email they have held as spam, and have an opportunity to release any of it I may want. After a couple of months, I quit looking at the individual emails because the system had tuned itself and 100% of what they stopped was, in fact, spam. I set up the Mail app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad to point to my account at Pobox, but you can use the mail app of your choice. Ditto for the iCloud email address, but I find Apple has little to none for spam blocking. I wrote some rules in Mail to send what I deemed spam to the trash automatically. My daughter uses Proton mail, seems happy with it but I don't have any personal experience with it.
One small tutorial moment, please. You said
i've checked and there's so many out there Yahoo, hushmail, proton, Mozilla, spark, macOS mail and the list goes on?
Those are different things.Yahoo, hush mail and proton are email servers. Mozilla is a developer of a mail application, Spark is a mail application. macOS Mail is an application, but iCloud is a mail service. So what's the difference? Well, a mail service like iCloud or Pobox, or Yahoo, or proton are email servers. They provide a location in the internet where mail sent to you arrives and is then dispatched to your mail application on your Mac when you ask for it. The thing that does the asking for those messages to be transferred from the mail service to you is the application on the Mac you use for mail. macOS comes with Mail, which is pretty good, but Spark, Thunderbird and several others are good alternatives. Most folks look for one that works the way they do. You then set up that application with your account information at iCloud, Yahoo, Pobox, proton, etc. Finally, some email services offer what is known as Webmail, where you can go to the website with any browser and log into your account and read the mail directly from the mail provider servers. iCloud and Pobox offer that for sure as I have been to both, I think Yahoo and Proton do as well, but I don't use them.
Think of it this way. Imagine the post office changes how it operates and only delivers mail when you call. So a friend sends you a letter, addressed to you at your post office address. The letter arrives at the local post office and waits there for you to call. You call and the letter is delivered to you. If you go to the post office, you can get your mail over the counter, directly. Now in email it works just like that. Someone sends you an email at an address in the internet. The message is delivered to your email service, where it is held until your system calls for it. The mail application you use, whether Apple's Mail, or Spark, or Thunderbird or any other local application, will make the call over the internet to get any messages being held for you and display them to you in the Inbox for you to open and read. If you go to the webmail service your mail provider may offer, you are reading the message directly from their server.
Hope that helps and doesn't add complexity. Basically, you pick the mail server you want (apple, proton, pobox, yahoo, hotmail, even gmail) and then the application you want to use (Mail, Spark, Thunderbird, a browser) and set it up to know what account you have and to get your messages for you.