Near the end of this post
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/show...t=73636&page=2 InquiringMind made a list of email services he's tried with very brief summaries of their strengths and weaknesses, in his opinion. I found it interesting and thought I would contribute my own list in roughly the order I joined them:
1. Various local ISP email services back in the era of dial-up Internet and not many people sending emails. Slow and plain, but exciting thinking about the future.
2. Earthlink was one of the first national email providers I used that provided a taste of the future.
3. Fastmail. I had a Mailcan address with them and the service was far superior to most at the time.
4. Gmail. Got my first address in 2006 and have been using it ever since. Big storage, speed, reliability, spam and phishing protection, and many useful (free) services. Google Photos is amazing.
5. Outlook.com. Close rival to Gmail as among the best free email services. The interface is more traditional, which many like.
6. Briefly tried and rejected due to poor performance: Migadu, MXRoute.
7. POBox.com. Used their basic service, which is email forwarding with SMTP so you can send from your own domain. Worked well. A few performance issues and left after slow cs not fixing my problem for days. Good value for money.
8. Namecheap. A quick and easy way to get basic email service for a domain. No problems, but limited features. Mainly used it for forwarding, which it did reliably.
9. ProtonMail. Decent interface and performance, but limited features. The phone app works well. I would use them again if I felt I needed encrypted email.
There are probably some others I have forgotten. How about you?