I am in the “Email is unsafe and cannot be made safe” camp. I use email assuming it is all compromised and it doesn’t matter too much if my addressees or my email provider accidentally leaks it.
You want to switch away from Gmail not because you’re worried that Google is reading all your emails (they’re not), you want to switch because you’d like to have a bit more control over pretty much the most important key for all your web presence and not be entirely beholden to the tech behemoth.
Before moving forward, you really need to register your personal domain name. It’s not rocket science, but if you need help, you can reach out to me via Twitter.
Next, you can decide if you want to run your own email server or just go with an established email provider, of which there are many. Running your own email server is absolutely doable, but probably not for everyone.
Here is the list of email providers in no particular order. I have not personally tried all of them so please do not take this as a recommendation of any kind:
- Zoho (they have a forever free plan for up to 5 users)
- Fastmail
- Runbox
Posteo(no custom domain support)- MXRoute (my current email provider, only because I got a really good deal on one of their plans)
- Migadu
- Mailbox.org
- Mailfence
- ProtonMail
- Tutanota
- Soverin
- StartMail
- Purelymail
- VFEmail
- Hushmail
- SealMail
- Thexyz
- Kolab Now
- Amazon WorkMail
- Google Workspace
- Yandex Mail (I think there’s custom domain support?)
- Microsoft 365
- Infomaniak (currently only available from Switzerland, with a waiting list)