I did a bunch of research on this earlier this year. I really do enjoy Gmail, even if it is technically a cloud service. So, I split the difference on this one. I use a Gmail account as "primary", but I still have my own domain for email inboxes. The best option I found is to have my own domain (e.g. at Hover) and then have the MX servers managed by Cloudflare's new product, email routing. They also handle SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. That's described here[1] and here[2]. What's nice about this setup: you have your own domain; you can setup custom forwarding rules; all email flows to a single GMail inbox. You can also still send email "from" those domains if you use the Gmail SMTP server[3].

So then your only concern is backup and email message export. For this, I setup automation with a script called got-your-back (gyb)[4]; it's a nice Python script with incremental backup that can archive your Gmail account and restore it to another account. I set up a second Gmail account to test this restore functionality.

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/

[2]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/email-routing/

[3]: https://jhart99.com/cloudflare-outbound-email/#outbound-emai...

[4]: https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back