A plug from a very satisfied customer: I pay $5/month for Fastmail. I've emailed support before and reached a human within hours. They helped me with my problem, because it was their job and I'm paying them to do it.
Email is too important to rely on a free service which has a history of shutting people out, at any time, for any reason.
I prepay for the 3-year package and it comes out to $3/mo or something. I'm not going to stop using email, and Fastmail is fantastic so I'm not going to switch away, so it's worth prepaying.
Yep, Fastmail is great. Google cannot be trusted. With google you are the product, not the customer. The Fastmail service and features are better than gmail as well.
Still the problem with Fastmail is the same as with Google. Leaning on 3rd party service that you have no control of. There are so many things that could go wrong there, they can be hacked, go bankrupt, closed by authorities, insided. Everyone should have an appropriate personal disaster recovery plan that includes stuff like recovering from loss of service supplier.
Well, there's always a risk profile no matter what you do. But the risk profile with a company that's obsessed with AI and doesn't believe in having any customer support is much higher than one that you pay and has very good customer support.
Fastmail has been extremely responsive to any random minor issues that have cropped up for me or the several people I got to transition to their service over the last 7 years.
Fastmail was blown offline by a couple of DDoS attacks recently. Both of them impacted my ability to access Fastmail, but I suppose you didn't happen to try to access your account during those attacks.
Email is too important to rely on a free service which has a history of shutting people out, at any time, for any reason.