Yeah I was also on Gmail when it was new, but it became appearent that Google was a bad actor many years ago. So I’ve been on fastmail for like 5 years now. It’s never been down. And it’s always very fast. They do care about privacy but since it’s hosted in Australia which is part of the 5 eyes pact, all data is shared with the NSA. To me it’s OK. I just want my email to be in a better place than Google.

But yeah I would also self host it if I could. I have a proxmox cluster with tons of virtual machines at home, running nomad to schedule jobs on them. I have pihole as a dns server so i get a lot of tracking protection just from that.