[magnetic]

I've been pretty happy with the following setup:

I have a domain at namecheap, which forwards my address (say [e-mail]) to my gmail account. I use fetchmail from my home computer to bring the gmail content to my local mail server (dovecot), which serves it out to me via imaps.

That means there is usually very little sitting in gmail, and it can accumulate there for a while when I have to do maintenance on my home OpenBSD server (which is quite rare and doesn't last very long generally).

That means I can keep my email address "forever" (it'll always stay [e-mail]) but I can switch out of gmail anytime I want, as long as the provider I switch to allows POP.

It also means I can take advantage of the spam filtering provided by gmail. I also take advantage of the "advanced parsing" they perform on my mail, but my default assumption is that anybody in the chain will be doing it anyways, so I have no illusions that switching out of gmail will help prevent any data mining.