For email I highly recommend FastMail. It is $30 a year and their spam filters are better than Gmail's. They also have a sleek web interface. The annual fee also includes good looking calendar and document storage features, but I have only dabbled with using those so I do not know how good they are.
Notes from a happy user with no relationship to the company.
My experience is from a couple years ago, but the app was not all that good. No trouble though, as K-9 mail is a quite nice OSS mail client for Android, it's probably the only mobile app that I've used and am nearly satisfied with the experience.
How does this work? You start changing all your account logins? How do you preserve history? Does FastMail import this? (actually just realized this would be a totally different email address, so might be moot)
I've considered it but there are a lot more variables I'm concerned about than delivery.
I can speak to what I did, and I recommend people at least start doing this immediately, even if they don't intend to switch email providers. Buy a domain name of your own, make an email address at it, and forward it to your current email provider. Every time you log into a website, make sure to update your email address to your new one.
Now, you're no longer tied to one company! When I decided to switch to FastMail, eighteen months later, I repointed the domain, and the vast majority of my email started flowing to the new service automatically! As a side bonus, if your email provider ever decides to ban your account (as Google has been known to do for spurious reasons), you can repoint your domain somewhere else, and you won't have to worry about losing access to all your other accounts and online assets.
You can use an IMAP email client to transfer your old mail, of course, and then I occasionally check my old mail account for stragglers. I chose not to auto-forward it so I'd clearly see what was or wasn't routing through my old Gmail account. I used to check it as often as I check FastMail. Then every couple days. Now I check my old Gmail account every week or two.
This is why you should have your own domain for email. Your email address is important and should remain constant regardless of who is providing your email service.
I like this idea, and do it for a domain or two but am not currently using it for private email. Are you just talking about using a domain registrar and using an email redirect? Is there a better way to do it? I can see wanting to grab the common TLD's, just to make sure you are easy to get in touch with. I'm thinking of com, net, org, and info.
I switched from gmail to zoho mail some years ago, when I frist got my own domain. Slowly moved logins etc. over time, but using my domain for all personal communication. Then at some point I switched to Fastmail, and as I owned the domain, did not have to do anything. Then a couple years ago I switched to gandi's mail because dollars became so costly that $30 was too much for me as a uni student. Today I do not have a use for my gmail, but I let it linger around because I need one for my android devices anyways. I was quite hopeful that Ubuntu Phone would be my next phone OS, but it let me down unfortunately. When I will be able to get rid of android, I'll remove my google account altogether.
When I left Gmail a couple of years ago, I switched to https://posteo.de and have been extremely happy so far. They are very serious about security and privacy (you can pay anonymously by sending cash in an envelope) but they are also open about their limitations. They are for example not offering Protonmail-style "end-to-end encryption" because that is essentally security theater (since the email provider controls the code that implements e2e, they can basically do anything they want). Based in Germany.
Can't recommend mailcow[1] enough! Took me a couple of hours setting up and moving 6 domains and 31 mailboxes after having to leave a shady provider quickly.
It includes everything like automatic certs, SPF, DKIM and has imapsync with a simple admin interface built in. Also comes with SOGo for webmail.
Not parent but I have heard really god things about https://www.openmailbox.org/.
It is not free if you want to use an external mail client (but paying for services with money is what we should want).
