Yeah I was also on Gmail when it was new, but it became appearent that Google was a bad actor many years ago. So I’ve been on fastmail for like 5 years now. It’s never been down. And it’s always very fast, and has many features Google doesn’t have at all. They do care about privacy but since it’s hosted in Australia which is part of the 5 eyes pact, all data is shared with the NSA. To me it’s OK. I just want my email to be in a better place than Google.
But yeah I would also self host it if I could. I have a proxmox cluster with tons of virtual machines at home, running nomad to schedule jobs on them. I have pihole as a dns server so i get a lot of tracking protection just from that.