A good idea is to never use a large corporation for important things like email, because these are built on maximum scalability and therefore practically always have lousy customer support (automated replies & chat, etc.). I'm paying for the same small email provider I used more than 20 years ago and it has always been worth every penny. If an issue comes up, I'll call their customer support or write an email and they fix it within minutes.

If you own the domain yourself you can have it hosted wherever you want because you can trivially move away

I switched to my hosted email, it is not so difficult to manage, and I feel very free.

Also I have created accounts for my children, my wife with very little costs. The magic? This very well supported project:

https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

I have been doing this for a few months for similar reasons - particularly spinning up family accounts with little additional overhead - but decided to pass in favor of hosted. Getting everything set up was fine enough and my mail was eventually being received in places I expected (I had to add my domain in Google's panel somewhere), but I noticed lag on receiving stuff, and was still occasionally ending up in spam folders. How are you overcoming that? Forwarding stuff off? Do you host in a VPS somewhere?

Typically solutions like that will work for a few months or years and then you are in much bigger trouble than before. Highly annoying. This is because just like every other server you will need to keep it up to date, you are going to have to deal with being falsely labelled as a spammer, you will have people attempting to abuse your server and so on. I'm still doing this but the overhead is such that I'm tempted to just let it go and move to Fastmail or something similar.

Even paid email you can be identified as a spammer. I use Namecheap's private email for my side project. I do zero marketing/automated emails.

All of a sudden my hand written emails to clients were going to spam. Namecheap verified my spf/dmarc/etc was all setup correctly and told me there was nothing they can do.

I don't communicate often and am just using my personal email address for now, but I'm looking to switch providers

To add to those points, one day you (the person with self-hosted email) would die and your family will be left without emails sometime soon and no way to get their widely used addresses back. Choosing a medium or large third party provider means you just need to document “go to <this site> and manage payments to pay <this much> <this often> to retain your address; this is how you contact customer support in case something isn’t working”.

There is Google Workplace where you pay $5/month/user for a google account including email and there is support

There is also 365 Basic, which is also $5 and gives you 1TB of Onedrive storage...

By far a better email service and the 2fa just works.

Works if all you need are Gmail and Docs.

It's a very bad idea if you want to use the account as a Google account. i.e. smart home does not work, lots of user features do not work, there is no workaround to this other than "don't use a Google Workplace account for personal life things, get a Gmail account".

Example of the pain to try and migrate from Workplace to Gmail just to get the workaround working: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...

Can you even use that if you're not logged in?

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "use"?

How do you gain meaningful access to help/support without being able to sign-in to their help portal / ticket system?

I've been exposed to that type of Kafkian catch-22 nightmare scenario all too many times :|

You call the phone number

When I was admining G Suite, if you wanted to call in, you needed to login to get the phone number and an access code. Which is hard to do when you can't log in.

You can pay for gmail too, and get phone/chat/email support via https://one.google.com/about/plans (basic plan is less than $2/month)

Doesn't this work for folks?

Backups are worthless unless you try to recover; support is worthless unless you put a ticket in and see what you get.

Before I migrated my domain and old emails to Fastmail I contacted their support twice to see what I got. Once I simulated an account lockout, the second was more of a technical problem. I can't remember the exact steps that I needed to take, but I do remember that their support was quick to react, had surprising technical depth, and fixed my "problems" faster than expected. I had no problem trusting them with my data.

Has anyone actually tested Google One's support?

Not if you can't log in!

I feel signing up for a new paid/self-hosted email becomes tricky when a person has used an email for most of his life. All the online-services, grad school, office-alum, etc. use the old email. And now when you switch to a new one then it becomes hard I feel. Any suggestions?

There's no reason you can't migrate over slowly. I have my freemail and personal domain both in use for this exact reason. Slowly switch over. It won't happen overnight.

I forward my gmail and iCloud accounts to my Fastmail account where my own domain is setup. I also only use my new email address and replace the gmail and iCloud whenever I see it in use. It’s a long process but worth it.

Email forwarding. For anyone you communicated with in the last year (or x months) you can send them an email to update your contact if you wish.

I've not found an online service you can't switch emails with.

> I've not found an online service you can't switch emails with.

I've probably switched email addresses on 200+ websites now, and there were a handful that don't seem to allow switching email addresses back when I made the switch. The situation could have improved since then, but you're basically right, very few don't allow one to change their email address.

I've set up forwarding from the old email to the new one and am slowly pointing everything towards the new email.

So unless you're rich enough to be able to pay for premium status, you don't deserve a reliable email address—something that is absolutely required to be able to operate in the modern world?

While I agree with your sentiment, I don't think that's quite what the person you're responding to meant. Rather than talking about how things should be, they're talking more about the reality of the available options as they are now.

To give a baseline: I pay for email hosting through a reputable non-Google company. It costs me about $40 a year, for both the domain name and the email hosting, and it didn't require me to have any technical knowledge to set up. Compare that with, for example, my cell phone plan (around $100 a year) and it seems pretty affordable, or at least comparable to other common bills.

I think it's helpful to think of this in terms of other utility services. People tend to agree that heat, electricity, phone, etc. should be accessible to the non-rich. But those still cost money to operate, and the cost is paid by consumers. (There can be a broader discussion around who should pay for this, but the money does come from somewhere.)

If we decided that electricity could be free, but that it would be funded through personal data collection, that you could permanently lose access at any time, and that you wouldn't be able to get outages fixed in a timely manner, that most people would prefer the current model.

The bottom line is that email is pretty important to modern life, similar to a phone. One way to ensure that your email is reliable is to pay for it.

The universe does not owe us anything. Speaking of email - why would I work for free (as an email provider) so that you can have a reliable email address and not pay for it? We live in a capitalist world. If you want free services - ask your government to provide them. Someone would still pay for that "free" service in tax.

You are paying for gmail, in a coin that Google accepts: your personal information. It's not "free" ...

Is it necessary to pay with a fiat currency to be considered as customer? Paying them with personal data doesn't count?

Is a pig the farm's customer when they "pay" with their flesh?