I use Purelymail, they're a tiny operation, but I've never had a single mail delivery issue. They're also by far the cheapest for most personal usecases. Their pricing is kind of "honor" based, you get simple pricing at 10 dollars a year without limits, unlimited users, domains, storage etc., but if you go overboard with it they'll ask you to use advanced pricing, which honestly is even cheaper, at least for my personal mail that I use like a normal person (a few incoming mails a day, one or two outgoing mails per week), advanced would be at.. 3 dollars a year or something.

My second option would be Migadu, though I've not tried them myself yet (I have zero complaints with Purelymail and will use them for as long as they exist).

Another thing I kind of wanted to try is to run a basic mail server on my own hosts, and send the mail through a provider like Purelymail or something, for full control over storage and backups, has anyone here tried that?

For personal or family, I think Fastmail is fine. I use it for a family account (paid years in advance), and admin other Fastmail tenants "family office" style for those who trust me to and offload the responsibility. I can get ahold of someone at Fastmail easily when issues crop up, which is rare. O365 is what I recommend for anything SMB and up. You can at least get support from Microsoft when needed. AWS is fine for cloud resources and infra, again, you can get support from a TAM or similar. But Google? I have never once had a good experience attempting to get in touch with a human when resolution is needed, hence my position on the topic. You cannot self serve critical business infra (imho), and Google is allergic to providing human support.

Buy your own domain and run mox (https://github.com/mjl-/mox) on it. In the setup it provides details on the DKIM info you need to put into your DNS records. Get a PTR record from your ISP (if hosting at home); periodically check your blocking from spamhaus etc.

I run mine on a Pi4 no problem whatsoever, but I guess a VPS could also be used, although the scamalytics analysis will show it's a server or an IP shared with an anonymising VPN etc. if it's a shared IP on the host.

I have run my mail there for 10 years and it was smooth sailing. Until they've raised prices two-fold but I digress…

For me Migadu has been good

I can understand you not ditching after the first suspension but the second suspension should have been the point where you took the choice.

First time is a fluke, second time is a serious wake-up call, third time it's your fault.

Do you really want to reach the point where all your customers have an outage, you have to rush implementing something else (oidc or api keys) AND rush your customers to change your settings?

Those are negligible compared to a 100% availability / uptime cost to your business incurred from being a serf to a feudal tyrant with no name or face that enjoys abusing you.

Using GCP, AWS, or Azure is like volunteering to use your own money to rent heavy construction equipment to construct your own jail cell and excavate your own grave.

But hey, at least you get to avoid the capex on the heavy construction equipment, and it's always¹ available!

¹ except for when human error takes it offline for 14 hours straight

> The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure

That's nonsense. It requires a 7 step setup process that customers will mess up.