What I'm planning to do is move the services I have registered with my Gmail account to a Fastmail account, and migrate my Gmail archive to that service. They handle contacts and calendars too, and their basic service is $3/month. That's cheaper and easier than running one's own mail server.

I've been test driving their service for a few days and so far it feels much more intuitive and faster than Gmail. It also works properly on every browser I've thrown at it, and their Android app is nice. I'm going to spend the next few days pruning my Gmail archive before transferring it so I don't have to buy the 25GB plan from Fastmail, then I'll tell all the services that use the Gmail address to use the Fastmail address instead. That second task will be the most time consuming and frustrating one, but it's worth the effort to break the chains of the big G.

(Edit: Corrected the price for Fastmail's basic service)