Fastmail for 12 years and counting. I keep a Gmail account for all my spam and newsletters, and I hate every single time I have to use it. Fastmail is so much better. It's fast, pure IMAP (technically they use JMAP but whatever), I set up all my custom domain names with it, unlimited aliases–and now it also supports creating aliases straight from 1Password.

Fastmail is incredibly good. Their name is not a joke: It's the fastest webmail client I've ever used, and their support is really good too.

I've been using iCloud. It requires you to trust apple, but if you're de-googling, you may be adding iPhones to your life, so it may be worth it.

The special sauce that makes it better is iCloud custom domain emails. Now I can have mynmame@lastname.tld email. If you ever want to jump ship again to new provider - you don't have to worry about changing your email, you can just migrate the DNS records.

If it wasn't for custom domains, I wouldn't recommend another tech giant, but I feel like this is a special combination of control && integrated ease of use.

I've been using Fastmail for years with a custom domain. I only have positive things to say