1. Have your own domain name.
2. Use a small-ish mail provider that supports IMAP, etc.
3. Store all your emails/folders on a device (laptop, whatever). This way if the provider locks you out or goes under, it's easy to switch to another.
Has worked since what, the 80's? Personally been doing this since before Gmail existed. Ironically I chose this route precisely because the major providers (Yahoo, etc) were too unreliable for me - I had lost accounts multiple times because some of the (then) top mail providers decided to get out of the mail business and/or regressed their featureset so much that it hurt.
Of all the Internet services, this is the easiest one for someone to own.
On the other hand they are small enough to certainly be hurt by concentrated DDoS attacks as it’s been happening the last week.
Mail provider with any small provider.
Use Thunderbird, it's honestly better that it has been in maintenance-only mode for a decade and isn't being "innovated".
You can also just use an email client that downloads the emails you get, and then point your MX-records to another provider if and when your provider goes belly up.
Sounds about right. For e-mail I'm using SES for outbound on my domain, and.. of all things.. Yandex Mail for inbound. SES doesn't seem to have any problem with spam filters, Yandex OTOH, it's definitely a temporary solution, I'm only using it for POP3, but their webmail is also fairly cute. Yandex outbound is treated as spam by basically everything except Yandex
Your choices are:
- Run it yourself: And get eaten alive by third party anti-spam products. Maintaining a mail server is a full time job.
- Move to another large corporation (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, et al). What have you solved exactly?
- Move to a small mail provider and hope they don't go under (and you lose your x year old email address associated with tons of stuff) or have security issues because they didn't/couldn't afford the expertise.
The "least bad" option right now just seems to be to spread yourself around, so you're not too invested in any one vendor (in particular in case they ban you randomly for reasons they won't disclose or discuss).