[Gorgo]

Just host your own mail server and you can have as many accounts you want - I have more than a thousand since I use special addresses when communicating with anyone who is not friend or family. If you worry over reliability - which in my experience is not a problem to be worried over given the tenacity of SMTP in attempting to deliver messages to temporarily off-lined hosts - you could arrange a reciprocal agreement with someone you trust to host a backup (MX) server for your domain(s). You won't have to deal with commercial plans, virtue signalling, filtering, bankruptcies (other than your own) or any of the other bothersome irritants which can be encountered when dealing with commercial entities. People will tell you it is impossible to host your own mail, that it takes enormous investments in time, that you'll be inundated in spam, that your outgoing mail will not be accepted by the likes of Google and Microsoft and more dire warnings of mayhem and misfortune for those who do not pay someone else to do this work for them. Nearly all of this is untrue, hosting a mail server is no black magic. Just make sure to configure the thing correctly, using a smart host to take care of outgoing mail - this is most likely mandated by your IAP - and DKIM/SPF/... to please those hosts which require it. Use Spamassassin and (optionally) greylistd for spam filtering, this will take care of the spam problem. All of this can be run on a SBC like a Raspberry Pi.

Source: I've hosted my own mail for more than 25 years now, taking it with me from ISP to IAP, from country to country, even through a period where I only had dialup (the consequence of moving to the countryside - now I have gigabit fibre in the same location) by having an arrangement with a friend who ran backup MX for me. Linux + Exim + Spamassassin + greylistd + Dovecot + Sieve is all it takes, all of it is free, running a Raspberry Pi (or similar) costs a pittance. An additional advantage is that you'll be ready for the decentralised future of the 'net.

[lucianf]

>Linux + Exim + Spamassassin + greylistd + Dovecot + Sieve is all it takes

Obligatory reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[Gorgo]

That 'obligatory' (why?) reference is not relevant in this case since self-hosted mail is at least functionally identical to 'cloud'-hosted mail, in practice often superior to such while the proposed alternative to Dropbox is not [1].

If you can not or do not want to host your own things, fine, that is your right. That does not mean that your own inability or unwillingness to do so translates to others. Some people never cook for themselves, they always eat out. It would be just as easy to present an 'obligatory' reference to 'flour + yeast + water + oil + tomatoes + garlic + mushrooms + bacon + olives + cheese = pizza', implying that those who think you can make your own are deluded. It is a good thing that most people realise cooking your own food is a good thing to (be able to) do, it would be a good thing if more people realised it is possible to 'self-cook' your own services, either from some instant package ('click here to install your own mail server') or by cobbling together the needed parts.

[1] ...but a self-hosted instance of e.g. Seafile or Nextcloud is functionally superior to Dropbox and, at least for Nextcloud, is starting to become supported in third-party products so self-hosting still wins in the end