Believe it or not, email service providers actually exist.

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.

> you're almost certainly going to have everything you send go straight to spam.

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.)

Yeah, but you're not beholden to them. There are 100 different hosts you can use if you own your own domain. If a host changes in a way you don't like, just move your domain elsewhere. If you're using Gmail, you're stuck with Google. Being independent of any one host is the important part to me.

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

There are tons of hosts! Personally, I love Fastmail.

Runbox is great, and not that expensive.

So? Your email won't be held hostage.

I have done as OP suggested and the main benefit is that I can move my email elsewhere.

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.