There are plenty of ways! I can personally whole-heartedly recommend Fastmail if you don't mind paying a bit for your email (and I believe that something as important as email is worth paying for).
There are two aspects that make this easier than most people realize:
- You will theoretically retain your existing Gmail address forever, even if you close your Gmail account. This means you can reactivate it at any time.
- You can use your new email address as the sign-in ID for your existing Google account. This means you can continue to use Google Docs, YouTube, etc and stuff without being reliant on Gmail.
For email, it's straightforward but a bit tedious. There are a number of ways to break it into smaller steps. Any approach should include getting your own domain name.
