As an alternative to moving providers entirely, Gmail still works without using the browser interface. My iPhone and desktop email clients both handle multiple providers, where Gmail is just one of a few. In other words, you can change clients immediately to try it out, and still switch email hosts if you choose and like the client later.
Man it makes me feel old that there's a need to point this out. Have most people never worked with native mail clients (MUA is the technical term)? Memorizing the POP (before IMAP) and SMTP servers for my email providers was quite necessary when I was young, especially since I liked reinstalling my OS often.
> and still switch email hosts if you choose and like the client later.
That's actually the whole idea behind having your own domain. If you are john@gmail.com and switch to john@fastmail.com, you have to tell all your contacts that you changed your e-mail address, which is not practical.
If you are john@doe.com, you can use it with GMail, and later move to Fastmail, and nobody has to know about it.
Oh, I know. I have self-hosted my main email for something like a couple decades now. I was getting sick of the ISP-provided one changing, either because I switched, or one acquired another and retired the old domain.
I haven't set it up to be a forwarding destination from Gmail, but should.
