Privacy and evilness issues aside, there's always the problem that what was once awesome and free is unlikely to stay so forever. New policies (max attachment sizes, storage restrictions) etc can also ruin the service.

I pay a very small amount to have my own mail server on my own domain. It is unlikely to ever change (great for long-term networking) and I control exactly how crappy or excellent the service is.

Considering how important email is to each of us in our daily lives, even non-hackers, I'm surprised more people don't pay for it.

I have my own domain too, in a shared server. But I set mine up to forward to my G-Mail account. How can one get a good mail interface if not through G-Mail?

Well, I'm stuck between two answers:

- You can't. - You can, if you use a native client through IMAP. Both Mail.app in OS X and Thunderbird work very well.

There are some open source projects out there that try to do a good webmail interface. It's been over a year since I last scoped out that scene, but there wasn't much stable, mature stuff back then.

I don't mind paying for the service, I would pay for Gmail. But now that they allow people to download all their email, I see no reason to run my own server.

I use my own domains and Gmail through Google Apps. I also backup frequently with an IMAP fetcher.

This setup gives me the best web mail client without vendor lock in, I can switch to my own server any time I want and keep all email addresses.