I've been happy with using Hosted Exchange on Microsoft. I own the domain so ultimately I can point the DNS to some other provider. Outlook stores the mails locally so I have a backup. I think the most important thing about E-Mail is to receive future E-Mails and not look at historical ones. In the end you can always ask the receipent to send you a copy of the email conversation - if you dont own the domain it get much harder to convince you actually own the email.

For < $100/year, Microsoft will sell you hosted Exchange (and you can use it with up to 900 domains [0]), 1 TB of storage, 2 installable copies of Office, and Office 365 on-line.

That's _much_ better than trying to host my own email server.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptio...

The point is that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. All services go down. If you're worried about someone else handling it when it goes down then host your own [1], otherwise you can use something different for each thing you need. Don't rely on Google for everything.

1- https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ema...

Yes, I know what's the point. But how do you avoid putting all your eggs in one basket? You can't host your email on more than one "provider" (including self host), and the vast majority of important services that you link your email to (bank, digital identity, taxes and other government services) does not allow you to have more than one linked to it; which means, that one goes down, you don't have one. Sure, I can give my accountant and my lawyer a second email address, hosted on a different provider, but that poses two problems: 1. how are they gonna know when one is working and one isn't? It's not like you get a notification if your email didn't reach most of the time, it just drops; 2. if you always send all emails to both addresses, now two providers have my data instead of one (of course excluding if one is self hosted). And you also need to always keep in mind that for all things important: one is none, two is one; so you should really have 3 addresses on 3 different providers according to that, which brings us back to the problems above. (and I'm not even mentioning the confusion that it would generate if you don't manage to get the same name with every provider "Wait, was it [email protected], or was it [email protected]? Or was that fastmail?")

As I said (literally in the second sentence), I don't rely on Google for everything, as you mention. I don't actually rely on Google for anything other than gmail, and of that I am also unhappy. The point I was trying to make is that there aren't really alternatives, and I was hoping someone might come out with a suggestion about how to overcome that problem.

You shouldn't use [email protected] as your main email, you should have your own domain. So `[email protected]` will always be yours no matter if you self host or use 3rd party. I currently use Fastmail and i've been very happy with them. If they fail or turn evil, I'll switch to something else maintaining the same address. Emails themselves should be downloaded/backed-up regularly, kind of like important documents you'd have on your disk.

> You can't host your email on more than one "provider"

You can do split delivery and have your email be delivered to two different destinations. It's less common than it used to be but it's trivial.

I'm running my own mail server, and I think anyone who has some experience with Linux should be able to do the same in a day or two. Once it's set up it just works.

You can still use Gmail and fall back to connecting directly to your server if Gmail is down.

Some mails might be flagged as spam if the IP/domain has no reputation, but that quickly passes, at least that's my experience.

I specifically use Gsuite so that I don't have to deal with managing a spam filter or dealing with IP reputation issues. I'd be willing to self-host almost anything else.

I guess something highly resilient would be - say - a mailserver on a rented VM replicating to two cloud providers via a service mesh.

Nice and simple! :D

A lot of domain registrars will host/relay mail for you if you don't want to think about it. Otherwise it's not too hard to host yourself. The sucky part is when it breaks because you can't really just put off fixing it.

I've been using mailu.io to host my own email server. Makes it real easy to manage yourself.

I haven't had any issues with new domains being marked as spam, but I always make sure the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are set up.