Free is not possible. Someone needs to pay for email, servers need to be repaired/replaced every few years, the power bill needs to be paid, someone needs to ensure that the latest exploit doesn't compromise the server. You are paying for your email, the only question is how.
I use fastmail because the payment is direct: I give them a few bucks each month.
With free email (gmail) the payment is not direct. They are doing something to get money, but what is unknown.
There are a lot of free services. Sure, they are getting money from someone, but small personal accounts often are free. Like they hook me on free account and then I recommend it or upgrade as I grow or just spread information about it. For example I never paid for DNS hosting. Currently I'm using Cloudflare for free.
ProtonMail has a free tier. It's definitely not the same level of service as Gmail, but I prefer it to being so dependent on the big G juggernaut for a critical service.
Downsides:
* spam detector is a bit aggressive, sometimes legitimate emails make it in there.
* features are limited unless you pay.
Full disclosure: I pay for their Plus product. My rationale is that I pay twice as much per month for Netflix yet email is hugely more valuable to me than Netflix is.
More full disclosure: I used to work for Google. That's part of what made me move from Gmail.
I'd argue that if ProtonMail's spam filter is too aggressive then basically you're in the same place you were with Gmail, aren't you? (Except now you're paying?)
The issue described in the OP is email not even making it to the spam folder. If it at least makes it to ProtonMail's spam folder, that's an improvement.
I'm hosting my mail on $1 VPS right now. It's hard for me to justify paying more. I hate to setup that mail stuff, it's too tricky and takes a lot of time, but still not worth paying extra.
This tip is good for almost any service. Gmail could ban you any minute. I doubt that they'll allow to get backups after that.
May be if I'm paying some money to some local company in my city, I can have some confidence, because I can come to their office and yell at them until they return my data to me. But they can just be incompetent and lose it, so even in this case I better do backups.
I would love to pay FastMail for my family’s email. I have myself, my wife, my four children, one family address and one other generic address. 8 emails would cost me $240 a year at a minimum.
If they could solve for my situation and not charge me that kind of money, I would switch from Gmail immediately.
I find it astonishing how much people devalue software and information services. The same people who have to have a $1500 phone and seem to think nothing of dropping $150 a month on Verizon or AT&T won't spend $5 on any cloud service.
This is why Google keeps winning and everyone else is losing, particularly the people who get the "free" services but don't have any say about those services.
The real numbers might be different, but I heard that Google gets about $100/yr in ad revenue per user. That is, they are getting $800 a year for all of those people. Everything you buy is $800 more expensive and there is no way you can say no to that!
You seem so unsure about your own point that you immediately downplay a users concerns about spending $250 a year by reducing that number to $5. Why the need to fabricate a theoretical number when someone provided you with a specific value?
If I spend $300 dollars on a phone every 2-3 years and $40 for service a month, am I then permitted to raise concerns about spending hundreds of dollars a year for email accounts?
I can just tell you that I've seen difficulty at selling things at the $5/month price point. In particular I've seen people bridle at the costs of running a very small system in the AWS cloud that costs about that much.
Not everyone spends money like that. I personally have a 6yr old phone that cost me $20, and since I'm usually on WiFi i have a $10/mo cell phone plan from an mvno. Most of my friends pay more than I do, but still are far from your example.
Fastmail allows for email aliases. These aren't those addresses with a `+` on them, but rather completely different addresses. You can put the family address and generic address in your own or your wife's account and setup a filter so that email to those addresses go to separate folders automatically. That saves you $60/year. If your children don't need privacy from one another (I've no clue how old they are or how well they get along), maybe you can also group them into 1 account to save you another $90/year.
By the way, Fastmail prices are rising. One used to be able to get a free account, and the standard plan used to be $40 a year, so might be good to get them sooner rather than later to get grandfathered-in in case of upcoming price risings.
Can you honestly not afford it? Or do you just think it shouldn't cost $20/month? I'm the sole income earner in a family of 5 and switched us to fastmail.
A lot depends upon how frugal you already are, but I found it trivial to find some extra savings to pay for it. There's a few things I like to treat myself to, and doing that one less time per month pays for it. Eating out one less time per month pays for it too. Ordering slightly cheaper meals for myself when we eat out would also pay for it.
Hell, when I turned off my home server, which I rarely used, I saved $9/month in electricity. If you live in a high power cost state, do a personal power audit. Our family was pretty lazy with turning things off until I figured out how much it costs to run any given thing.
With a family of 6, if you haven't crunched your finances, there are lots of very minor behavior changes that can save you enough money to pay for something like fastmail.
Migadu is the place to go--they charge for traffic, not mailboxes. I'm in a similar boat with lots of domains, aliases, and mailboxes. My family comfortably fits in their "mini" plan, $48/year.
Indeed, I am very glad they have no free tier. It keeps bad apples out and let's them focus on actual paid customers. Great products don't need a free tier.
Does Google allow you to use your own domain for free?
They removed the free GSuite tier a long time ago, and they've obscured some the options you could use to configure a similar setup in gmail. I'm not sure if it's still possible.
I don't believe it's possible with non-Google Domain hosted domain names but I own a number of domains that I use to send and receive from my root @gmail.com account for free (Google is my registrar for these). They come in to @gmail.com from @mydomain.com and when I reply it goes out as @mydomain.com. I can also send email from any of my @mydomain.com emails by opening compose and clicking an arrow on my from address.
There is the huge possibility that this will cause issues with some mail servers because I'm assuming it's doing a send on behalf of (I could be totally wrong). But so far (1yr+) I don't recall any issues.
I switched to Proton for a bit but I just didn't enjoy using it at all. The final nail in that coffin; I was in the middle of selling a house and receiving documents and tons of back and forth and it was an absolutely terrible experience. Every realtor/contractor/etcs signature pictures, etc showed up as attachments and the search was awful so having to dig up contracts and everything else that goes along with a house sale was just an absolutely miserable experience. Every single email looked like it had tons of attachments. I had to go through every single email in a thread to find the actual documents.
