Register your own domain and use that for your email, and you'll no longer be held hostage by Google. Takes almost no effort and will cost you a few dollars a month.
Apart from people who are knowledgeable or at least curious enough to search for alternative options, I suspect many people don't even know what a domain is or that they could register one for them to use. The jump from "why pay for email if Gmail/Outlook is free?" to "register a personal domain and use it for your emails" is too big.
I don't have the ideal solution but what I've suggested to friends and relatives is they should consider paying for their personal email accounts. Most of them don't care but some do and, as a result, at least try to understand what they want or need and are willing to pay for.
Dead on arrival.
The tools and offerings we're given are built to fulfill the needs of the greatest number of people. For better or worse, those people are not people who want to mess with the infrastructure around their email.
If it weren't, then Google's business model would not be viable.
Mostly because of conditioning: it’s been 25 years now that free webmail is the way Gen-X, Y, Z, and future generations do email. Boomers and the older Gen-Xers may still be hanging onto an ISP address, if they haven’t moved too much since the 1990s.
After all that, plus with their email addresses being the opposite of portable, there is no limit to how much crap people will take, when the alternative is learning a little bit about domain registration and DNS, and paying $60 a year for Fastmail or whatever. Email, they believe, is supposed to be free as in beer.
Sad but true. Also, confession: I used to use first name @ full name . com and got tired of the confused looks and typos when I had to give it out, so now I use a six-character Gmail with numbers so that it’s just like people expect.
You still need to register with someone like google, or Proton, etc.
Personally I have my own mail server and use smtp2go for sending which handles the deliverability issue. I'm not sure it's worth it going this way but I found it fun and its been 0 maintenance
For now my email is with Apple, since they offers email hosting as part of the icloud+ (or whatever its called). If they decide to die/enshittify, then I can move to another host without having to change any contacts.
One the other hand, since I did use my bare gmail for some years, I am still stuck with it, in case I have some service that depends on it.
I don’t wanna sound like a salesman. It’s just that it’s been a surprising good experience for my family, especially for the price tag of $0. And if it ever does start to suck, I can point our domains at a different server.
I run my own email server on DO, nothing I send goes to spam. (I normally follow up on nearly all emails in case you're assuming some flavors of sample bias.)
Rollernet.us is a good one. They have excellent deliverability, reasonable prices, and everything you could want related to email.
They have a few minor other services, like DNS management, but they are not a cloud compute provider.
Another option is to use a cloud compute provider like AWS. You don't need to run the VM yourself to use SES for email messages. The hard part is the webmail access: you have to choose between a poor interface (an S3 bucket) or running a managed VM to host something like Roundcube.