You don't need to reinvent the wheel to have a "somewhat safe email". Just own a personal domain and host it on migadu, mailcheap, mxroute, Zoho or any other provider.
Migrating DNS providers is a pain - recently done it twice. Transfer itself is reasonable with most providers. Importing/exporting a BIND-formatted zone file is sometimes unheard of, as is setting custom TTL; you'll have to go through a stupid form. One provider tries to hold your hand so tightly it won't let you set CAA with iodef, only issue/issuewild.
Migrating email is a pain. Yes! You can just point your MX elsewhere, and that is brilliant. You still want to copy over all your email, and given IMAP has won, if you don't have a recent backup (who does back up their email?), losing your old account sucks.
Fixing up your email clients is also troublesome. You can't just CNAME smtp.yourdomain.com to smtp.example.com, because that's nuts, so changing providers from example.com to beispiel.de requires a couple more dances; provider docs also suck, and email clients usually fail a dozen times before you can find the right incantation. You could set up your own autodiscover, but that requires an HTTPS server.
Yes there are providers that sell a full package and do all the initial setup for you, but that's not the point of owning your domain.
Yeah, I sometimes do sysadmin stuff for fun. None of this is fun.
That's my entire point. Contrast this process with buying an app on your phone. Insert coin, done; vs insert coin, battle a dragon.
> [...] they should be straightforward for anyone who has reasonably solid command line chops.
That's my entire point. I've been familiar with the command line since before I could write with a pen, and I still dislike doing any of that stuff.
> Once you've moved over to your own domain and your own server/software, you're done--you don't have to do it over and over.
That's my entire point. You don't have to, until you do.
I back up my email (some of it going back to 1996) twice a day. I lost several months worth of emails a few years back. That won't happen again.
The real problem comes when your email address is owned by someone else (eg. @gmail.com).
That’s the definition of lock-in.
OTOH - before email existed, the critical "how do we contact the real you?" identifiers were phone numbers and mailing addresses.
And if you failed to pay your phone bill, or rent, or property taxes...the exact same problem - someone else would get "your" identifier.
Traditionally, for anything that's even slightly important, either your physical presence ultimately acted as your identity, or significant legal liability protected the non-physical identity (that is, if a court sends an important letter to you at some address, someone else who moved in to that address faces significant legal penalties if they open that letter).
In contrast, many domain providers will resell your domain in a heartbeat once you miss a payment deadline. And then the buyer can do whatever they want with emails sent to that domain, since there's no such thing as identity theft when your domain is your identity. In the case of a mailing address, it's not an identity at all, which is why non-junk mail will also have a recipient line.
and passport.com, which was their SSO login system