I've been using Gmail since high school, but I'm definitely thinking that it's time for me to abandon ship and actually get my own damn email.
Use your own email address with Gmail, make regular backups and switch the provider if Gmail locks you out.
I'd like to find a way to backup mails preferably via pop or imap - great if dedup and incremental backup are available. Backing up ~/Library/Mail/V5 doesn't really work as expected. Regular snapshot/dumps are also not very effective.
I've moved to Fastmail in 2015 and I had a long term Gmail account since high school, I've never missed Gmail one bit, I encourage you to do it.
I also moved to Fastmail years ago. I used to think it would be hell to migrate a service as essential as email, but it basically took a repointing of DNS and running Fastmail's importer. It took half an hour and I've been a super happy user ever since, and I couldn't believe how bloated Gmail felt after trying Fastmail.
I use Google for ~15 years now (own domain) and I appreciate the let me use what is today GSuite for free.
Moving to fastmail would be a possibility but they do not have a calendaring system.
They do have one, I can't comment on the quality of it since I never used it (I also never used Google Calendar) but it's there.
Huh? FastMail has had a fully-featured calendar for years.
The thing keeping me from switching away from Gmail is the lack of IMAP IDLE on iOS. I can’t believe Apple still refuses to implement it in 2018...
I see a FastMail app on the App Store but from the screenshots it looks pretty bad (is it just a web view?)
There are other general-purpose mail apps on the app store. I'm partial to outlook.
FastMail supports native iOS mail push notifications for mail.app. That caters my usecase.
Another good reason to drop iOS from your workflow.