I have been using my own email server since 2000.

For me, Gmail is only an email aggregator for my multiple email accounts. At home I keep on using a trusty desktop IMAP client.

I'm actually fine using IMAP, but I really don't want to run my own dovecot/exim/spamassassin servers. It's really inconvenient and really hard to filter out spam. What I need is a hosted IMAP/SMTP service that does spam filtering. I'd prefer not to stay on gmail and use their imap/smtp, but that might be the short term solution.

Fastmail is pretty great.

I've just noticed the praise recently for this. Two dealbreakers for me:

- No push on iPhone (as far as I can see)

- No Calendar integration

Yeah, Apple doesn't support IMAP-IDLE which is a drag, so push is out. And you're right, there's no calendar. I also hear LDAP is read-only on devices, so you can't add to your Fastmail address book from your iPhone.

I personally don't use any of those things anyway but I can definitely understand why that would be a dealbreaker for a lot of people. It's great for email and the webmail interface got way better recently. Their blog is also pretty neat, they go into a fair bit of technical detail about new features and how they solved certain bugs: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab-communication-u...

I closed my google account today after spending a few weeks migrating. Try fruux for calendar and contact sync, it's hosted in Germany and I'm happy with it

Have you tried Fastmail?