The Search for a New Personal Email

For over ten years, I’ve been using the same old email address for my private communication. The email address is tied to my ISP — or, in fact, to my parents’ ISP. Now, my parents are changing their ISP, and my email address will be deleted. So, I was on the hunt for a new personal email address.

My initial requirements:

Availability of my preferred address
Paid service, as I don’t want to be the product, but not too pricey
Calendar support
Trustworthy and durable

I did a bit of research and found out that there is no clear winner. These were the options I considered:

Proton Mail

I liked the idea of Proton Mail a lot, but you have to use their proprietary clients, which I didn’t like, since I need to use Outlook for work and don’t want to manage two email clients.

Google Mail

My preferred address was not available, and since I switched to Apple, I try to avoid Google products. That said, if you're comfortable using one of the big popular providers, Google Mail is still a very valid option.

Outlook.com

I’m already a Microsoft 365 subscriber, and all my requirements were fulfilled, so I gave it a try. However, I had two experiences that made it impossible for me to continue using Outlook.com:

Their spam filter is way too aggressive. At least 90% of my emails — all legitimate — went to spam.
My account got randomly locked during a vacation due to a TOS violation (you can find plenty of Reddit posts about this issue). My appeal was successful, but I was without access to OneDrive for a few days, which had all the documents for the trip. Since then, I no longer trust Microsoft.

iCloud

I’m already an iCloud+ subscriber, so this seemed like a logical choice. Initial tests were successful, so I migrated dozens of accounts. Boy, was that migration a PITA. So many sites have broken processes for changing email addresses, and a lot of sites simply don’t support changing them at all. Even big names (looking at you, RyanAir). While everything works now, I’m still not 100% happy with the solution. I suspect Apple silently blocks some emails (there are plenty of Reddit posts about this as well), and their spam filter is also pretty aggressive. However, the support for custom domains is a nice plus.

I don’t want to waste another weekend migrating dozens of accounts, but in the future, I’ll probably move to my own domain and an email server from IONOS. However, with calendar support, this can be a bit pricey, and IONOS webmail doesn’t support MFA, which is not ideal at all.

Please let me know if I missed anything obvious or if you think there is an obvious choice.