Use your own domain at the very least. Preferrably one that is your legal name so that if anyone ever tries to take it (either from just buying it if it lapses, or just attacking it/you) you have some legal protection in the US from the ACPA.

Then it's just a matter of keeping backups of your email.

Agreed. I use my own domain and I use my providers email forwarding to a sass email client. If my email provider pisses me off I just change my forwarding to some other provider. I may lose old mail, if the provider goes away completely, but that's not too big a deal for me and backups could solve it if it was important.

Now, if my domain host goes belly up, I'll probably have a somewhat painful process of porting my domains elsewhere. It's still doable but it would probably mean a few days of downtime.

only use your own domain if you want everything tied to your real name

I have my own domain and I use desktop email clients, so I always have a full copy of my email archive.

It would take me at most 1 hour to move, on the clock. I know because I moved between email provides about 3 times already.

("imapsync" helps)

Its trivial to backup your important emails offline as they come in. Any time you allow a 3rd party to control your data or your property (digital or physical) you are taking a chance. One of many reasons "the cloud" is overrated and overhyped. There may be reasons to use cloud computing, such as the convenience, but shared data-space always remains inherently insecure and anything stores there is, by definition, outside of your control.

The nice thing about a custom domain however is all you have to do is repoint it to a different provider if that happens.

Until your domain gets pulled off by your registar for whatever weird reason. There's no absolute way to escape, sadly.

I agree with that, but the distribution of where you have things makes it a bit more difficult. If I have amazon hosting my domain, email, website, and I shop there, then me getting banned because they didn't like me returning too many things will affect everything else. Having my domain at No-IP, Email at fastmail, website self hosted means that Microsoft banning an account I use won't affect any of that.

If your domain gets stolen then you're similarly out of luck. You now need to change your email on every website you use, which for many requires email confirmation or contacting support.

The chances of losing your domain are lower than your chances of becoming a false-positive of one of these Saas account-banning automations.

The sky is falling :-)

But no, we are not talking about the same degree of risk.

You're comparing car rides with BASE jumping.

That’s why I host my own Email. Maybe after more of these random, unaccountable unappealable accounr bannings happen, people will wise up and stop relying on cloud services for essential things.

Tried hosting my email too. Not worth the hassle. Too much work to set it up, then to keep your domain or your IP out of blacklists, to take care of your reputation, etc.

You can host your own email just like you can generate your own electricity. It's definitely worth it for other people and we definitely need more people that self host to keep email an open standard, but personally I've got better things to do.

I agree that it’s hard. I justify the effort spent because my email access is essentially my single source of failure credential for the rest of my online life. Some things that are important are hard.