If, perhaps, you decide against self-hosting, but still want a reasonably good solution, consider owning your domain but buying a hosted mail service. You own the MX records, so you can point it to a service and change it in the future if you need to (without fiddling with setting up a new mail host). Say you use XYZ mail provider, but they shut down for business. You can buy mail hosting from someone else within a day, and all the undelivered mail (if senders follow spec) will be delivered to the new service. And, in most cases, you can import your whole mailbox if you have it synced locally. I find this to be a good balance between privacy and not fiddling with anything at all. I thoroughly respect someone who selfhosts their mail but for me it's too crucial to worry about an update bringing it down - outsourcing it to an expert with proper fallbacks is more safe to me.
I personally use migadu, $19/yr (they have a student discount as well) for unlimited domains, 200 emails in/20 out daily/5GB storage. That's the lowest plan and I don't think I've ever surpassed it (the limits are soft anyhow). I get surprisingly less actual important email than I thought. (I use my gmail for rewards cards, etc)
But, to actually answer you, mailcow.email seems pretty good :)
Thank you! I've owned my name in domains for over 20 years, it was the first domain purchase I ever made. I want to be able to store the mail etc. locally. OPs post reminded me of the guy who sent a photo of his child to their doctor and was locked out of his gmail account. I've heard of similar incidents with even less evidence and reason and it worries me. Making the switch to my own domain and hosted mail server would hopefully solve that.
Well, yes, it's something you are technically renting. There has to be a balance between cost and convenience. If there was a lifetime fee to own it, think of all the domains that would be already bought up - there'd be barely any left. However, in almost every case, there is nothing that will get your domain taken from you, unless you fail to pay or break the domain registrar's TOS (copyright infringement, etc). Far higher bar than Google's AI deeming you bad.
And regarding failed payments: My registrar at least emails me 30 days in advance, will email in case of failure, and will not put the domain up for sale until after a grace period (IIRC at least a week), during which they will repeatedly attempt to contact you.
Also, even if you can't own it: that's true of self-hosting also and doesn't apply to just purchasing hosting
I personally use migadu, $19/yr (they have a student discount as well) for unlimited domains, 200 emails in/20 out daily/5GB storage. That's the lowest plan and I don't think I've ever surpassed it (the limits are soft anyhow). I get surprisingly less actual important email than I thought. (I use my gmail for rewards cards, etc)
But, to actually answer you, mailcow.email seems pretty good :)