Experience with externally hosted mail services?

[tdalej]

Admins -- If this is off topic for this forum, please remove/delete this.

I have been coasting a long with email services from yahoo for a long time, but enshitification hs taken it's toll.
I have over the years set up my own mail servers in my domains - but I know I don't have the bandwidth to do the administratoin needed to keep the service healthy and clean. 
So, I'm looking for a reliable hosting provider that I can use for IMAP/SMTP services - One that doens't use Google, Amazon, etc. - and I'd like to gp with a company that as ethical as coproprations can be.
I have spent thta last week or so going through reviews and web sites from countless providers -- in most cases, email seems to primarily be a web site hosting add on. 
I have my own domain(s) and already host web sites for each locally.

I have a list of criteria that are required:
IMAP + IMAP Storage - prefer 20GB per mail box or more
SMTP
5 mailboxes at a minimum, but would much prefer accounts managed at domain(s) level so that I can create/remove mailboxes as needed.
Unlimited Aliasing

A Nice to have but not currently in use is Shared Calendars.



The marketing fluff around this is ... very strong.
And there are a lot of them out there.

I'm tossing rocks in the pool at this point in the hope that someone out there has a provider they are happy enough with that they will reccomend them, so I can narrow the field a bit.

[Monviech (Cedrik)]

Best just host a Plesk or cPanel server on a vps somewhere.

For my emails I host 2 plesk servers with a cloud provider.

I think total cost is ~30€ or so per year for both of them unlimited traffic etc.

Benefit is you can do whatever you want, drawback you need a bit of admin experience so theyre configured correctly and safe.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

There is a free tier of the Axigen self hosted mail server software, which I find quite nice. Rich feature set, good UI. The free tier is limited to 10 mail boxes.

https://www.axigen.com/mail-server/free/

[tdalej]

I'd really rather not have to manage the email server.
Not impossible but I'd rather let someone else deal with that bit of it.
And I have been using Yahoo for a long time -- Since they first started offering email addresses -- it had almost all of that when I first set up, but as generally happens, enshitification has taken over.
Time to move.

I don't mind paying for the service, just not exorbitant amounts.

I'm starting to look atservices (like fastmail) that allow a free period to see the feature and support response.
I just went through fastmail and for some reason even though dnschecker.org shows the proper DNS record propagation, fastmail still shows them in an error state.  :/