If you're okay with a non-standard email account that you need to use their app for, hey.com has been a game changer for me. Being able to handle the flood of incoming messages that comes from having an email address for 35 years.

Oh, wait...

Is it:

Who is the best paid-email provider?

-or-

Who is the best-paid email provider?

-or-

Who is The Best Paid Email Provider (tm)?

Free email providers get paid by selling your data or stuffing your inbox with advertising.

Many free email providers also have terrible or non-existent customer service because that would raise their costs.

If you are happy with your email provider, who is your email provider and what is it about their service that makes you happy?

As for my preferred email provider, that's Fastmail.

The downside is that downloading messages is fairly slow when you have 10-20k messages in your inbox. And the webmail is fairly primitive.

I never tried Fastmail.

I wanted to like hey.com for some of their enhanced email management tools but I didn’t like the platform in general.

I can’t believe no one lets me set “keep 30 days of this newsletter but delete the rest”. Setting filter rules per email in Gmail feels silly. With newsletters, value is inversely proportional to receive date.

What I’m getting at is.. best email provider and options for someone who is kinda, but not entirely, done with email..? Most email platforms still treat email as a first class communication platform, but for me, it definitely isn’t.

But I know it's private, and I can generate email aliases to use for each service I sign up for.

No fuss, just works, good price for what they deliver. Never had any issues.

I prefer Fastmail.

They have a great web interface that knows how to properly deal with (catch all) aliases including using the proper address to reply.

They do DNS hosting.

They do WebDAV/Files hosting including being able to create unique shareable links to files and/or dirtree style websites or picture galleries. I've found it all very useful.

I also like their rules filtering which let's you do custom sieve code that I have found pretty handy.

Been with them for 12 years now and they've been consistently great. Before that I was hosting my own mail service using Cyrus IMAP (and since FM is the biggest contributor to the Cyrus suite, that's how I had learned of them).

I would like to say protonmail, which is cheaper and has a more secure email setup (which involves encrypting incoming emails as they come in) but because of this it doesn't support IMAP integration without an extra decryption daemon. Ultimately this extra security is useless anyways because the email protocol is weak to MITM (see lavabit situation).