> Thank god i started hosting my own mail (and other stuff)
Same thing here. If you can at all (have access to a "quality" IPv4 with open ports), self-hosting your email is the best thing you can do for your privacy and convenience. No spyware analyzing emails and contacts, no annoying webmail interface (use any IMAP client), no constant reminders to provide a phone number or recovery email, no annoying 2FA requests, no "suspicious logins" reminders if you use a VPN, unlimited mailboxes, attachments, and aliases.
Once you start hosting your email then moving away entirely from Google is pretty easy.
I used to host my own email, but eventually moved to Fastmail. I have to communicate with a number of professionals that work for companies using fairly aggressive third party archiving and filtering solutions (for example, Proofpoint). Keeping my email server on long-term clean IPs in ranges where one other customer didn’t ruin the entire range became a real hassle.
Several such of the larger providers in that space won’t allowlist single IPs if you can’t prove administrative control of the subnet. Alas, I don’t have my own network allocation.
Part of me misses self-hosting. Part of me is glad that I don’t have to manage that anymore, given the growing number of other services, hosts, and network space I manage.
A compromise that may be acceptable is to relay outgoing mail through a commercial provider like AWS or Mailgun. The vast majority of my email is inbound, so even using a relay for better deliverability wouldn't affect my privacy much.
Same thing here. If you can at all (have access to a "quality" IPv4 with open ports), self-hosting your email is the best thing you can do for your privacy and convenience. No spyware analyzing emails and contacts, no annoying webmail interface (use any IMAP client), no constant reminders to provide a phone number or recovery email, no annoying 2FA requests, no "suspicious logins" reminders if you use a VPN, unlimited mailboxes, attachments, and aliases.
Once you start hosting your email then moving away entirely from Google is pretty easy.