Google's made progress with their handoff of domain-related things to Squarespace. As I write this, my domain is being transferred to Cloudflare.

However, no longer being with Google means no more Google Workspace for the email associated with this domain. So where should I go? My primary concern is avoiding the issue I had previously where emails were simply forwarded to another email but would sometimes be lost due to email destination authentication failing for the sender (or at least that's what Google Support said).

I really only need basic sending/recieving functionality, the ability to use a custom domain, and the industry standard IMAP/SMTP access. Spam filtering would be strongly preferred, but I haven't had an issue with that since the days that Verizon still managed Verizon.net emails. Calendars, rules, etc are all something that I manage via Thunderbird.

I'd like to avoid Outlook, Google/Gmail, and AOL. I don't mind paying for email service, but I've had bad experiences with two of those three and feel a little bitter about the third for making me have to do this to begin with.

The top contender looks like ProtonMail. I've already reached out to their support team to see if they know if this would be an issue or not. So far the only point against them is that you have to buy the bundle that includes extra drive space and a VPN - two things that I'm sure increase the overall price.

A small note on my search so far: where's Hey, that email service everyone was raving about for a while, in all of the "top 12 best email providers" lists that keep appearing in Google? Did they piss off the wrong listicle writer? Are they just not interesting anymore?

I don't think I'll go with them for three reasons:

1. Most of their benefits appear to be part of the interface they offer.
2. It would cost me 120$/year because the domains plan costs 10$ for a single user per month and they do not offer a yearly pricing option for the plan with custom domains.
3. They don't support IMAP or POP.

How was this popular with all of the developers I was following?