[mokash]

I think we need a paid email provider, someone who's sole business is to provide email services, and maybe a calendar. Someone who you can host your own domain with and someone who's mission it is to ensure their customers have privacy, security and can rely on their services. Someone who doesn't just guarantee their services for as much as you pay for them but someone who is willing to put their ass on the line to prove that they're a good provider.

Sure, you could just set up your own email server but why go through the hassle? There's a real opportunity here, my mother doesn't know how to set up her own email provider, neither does my aunt. A good email provider will make it really easy to do everything related to email with advanced spam filtering capabilities and will run a very tight ship.

A man can dream.

[Derbasti]

Actually, getting a paid email account is easy. Just about every hosting provider out there also offers an email address.

Web access is usually terrible though. If you're lucky, they provide roundcube, which is ok, but certainly inferior to Gmail. If you use IMAP and some desktop client, this might not be a problem.

The hard part is the calendar and contacts. I don't know of any CalDAV or CardDav provider. Your best bet is probably some hosted Exchange solution, which provides ActiveSync.

[mokash]

The biggest problem with web hosting providers' email services is the lack of effective spam filters similar to Gmail's though.