I highly recommend Proton Mail. Their email phone app and webapp are very good and they seem to be branching out into other services like calender integration and VPN. I've been working on reducing my reliance on Google services for awhile, but it has been very slow with how many accounts I've registered using my Gmail over the years.
The only problem I've had with Proton Mail is that the free tier on the phone doesn't let you have two emails logged in at once. Normally I would want my real identity email and my internet identity email to be logged in at the same time. Which is doable in the webapp at least. I may end up paying the $3 a month not just to unlock this feature, but to support a non-Google service in general.
I highly agree. So many times I click on links thinking I am going to expand an image only for it to navigate away from Lemmy altogether. I'd also like any image that is auto included from a link to another site to expand like a directly uploaded image would expand. Then only clicking on the link is what opens a new tab.