> and will cost you a few dollars a month
Dead on arrival.
Dead on arrival.
If it weren't, then Google's business model would not be viable.
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.
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.