I have used Fastmail for years with a custom domain without a single problem. Amazingly great communications from the company too. Highly recommended but not free. (Less than $2/month though - so almost free.)
I’m doing this in the coming days — setting my custom domain with Fastmail. I’m planning on making that my main email and trying my best to unsubscribe from things on my Gmail account and move accounts over from Gmail to Fastmail until I think for certain I could delete my Google account entirely with no harm.
Then again, I rarely have and like having subscriptions these days because of minimalism but I suppose this is a good trade off for my entire lifetime.
On a different note, does anyone know how GoDaddy is in terms of privacy? Is there a better domain registrar out there?
Edit: Just realized I’m using Google’s Project Fi on my iPhone SE, with Hangouts.
I generally don't trust GoDaddy, but I don't see how they could violate your privacy. From what I can tell, the worst they could do would be to log DNS queries. If you have a server with a static IP, you can always serve DNS yourself.
Out of curiosity, what domain registar do you use? With GoDaddy, I pay $14.99/yearly for .COM Domain Renewal and $9.99/yearly for Private Domain Registration Renewal. It seems a bit price-y but I'm completely unaware of other competitor's prices.
I use Namecheap, but it's not the cheapest. A couple months ago on a thread here in HN a bunch of people were recommending Porkbun, which seems quite cheap (~$9/year with free private domain), but I've never used them.
Does Fastmail have decent search that works on mobile? Gmail’s search is just too good. I’m currently using mailbox.org but it’s impossible to search for old emails that are not already downloaded to your phone. The only way is the use web interface and it’s annoying as hell.
I paid $117 for the 3-year plan with custom domain (and that price is discounted slightly from the normal 3-year price), which comes out to $3.25 per month. So, definitely not under 2 dollars, but easily under 4.