First of all, buy your own domain from Gandi.net, hover, namecheap, or wherever you prefer. Then get an email account at a private provider who let's you use your own domain: fastmail, gandi, proton, tutanota.. As long as you keep paying for your domain registration, you are not beholden to a mail provider.

Fastmail with your custom domain. I am a user, I am not paid to advertise them. I do not miss Google at all.

If you do not like Fastmail, still get your own domain for emails.

Migrating to Fastmail is pretty painless too if you already have your own domain.

I moved to fast mail a couple of years ago and got my mom to move to and I’ve been a happy customer the whole time it’s great. I moved when I started getting concerned about how reliant I was on google. Now my core services are spread across several different companies. I also am not affiliated in any way.

fastmail.com

Stop answering e-mails. No, seriously.

fastmail with custom domain

I did with Fastmail and a custom domain name. Very easy (Fastmail has a Gmail import tool), highly recommended.

Anything- including RFC 2549 based communications. =)

I've been using Protonmail with 3 custom domains for a few years, but I'm quite upset by the state of their bridge. They struggled a lot with IMAP compatibility, they only test it on Thunderbird, Outlook and Apple Mail before releasing it, and you can't connect to the bridge from another machine (well, you can technically set up an SSH tunnel or use socat to forward the localhost ports, but that's a hack that is not officially supported nor advised).

I'm now considering switching to Fastmail or Tutanota.

Or even run my own mail server. I used to do that until a couple of years ago, but I eventually got frustrated by all the dumb rules that Google and Microsoft (but mostly Microsoft) set in place to discourage people from running their own servers.

However, given the amount of time that I've already spent to debug the Proton bridge and open PRs to fix their sh*t, I must acknowledge that running my own Postfix server and spending a couple of hours to set up the right DNS records would have probably saved me a lot of time (and money).