If you're a technical guy you'd know it's very much possible to host your own email servers. I've personally done it for about 25 years now. You just need a reputable smtp service and even gmail gives that away for reasonably free.

I hit 100% recently and got a message that I won't be receiving new mails. I tried to figure out how to delete emails en mass since there is nothing save-worthy, but didn't see that option anywhere. I ended up creating a script that goes thru every page, deleting 30 or so mails at a time. Ended up running for few hours, but I managed to clean up my Gmail.

70% full doesn't sound like "almost full" to me: that's about 4.5/15 GB free

The trick is that all google services share the same 15GB free tier. So if you start using Google photos and upload 10GB pictures, you only have a total of 5GB left for emails.

Step 1: Get your own domain and use that for mails either with Google or some other service. When you've promoted that new address everywhere you will at least be able to switch services (or even host your own) more easily.

I have been a fastmail customer for many years now (originally a pobox customer) and their email service is really nice. Easy to bring your own domain: set a couple of MX records and you're good to go.

Start paying for your internet services so that incentives align properly. Pay for search. Pay for email. They aren't that expensive and you get to escape google's bullshit.

You can use pop3 or IMAP to access your gmail and keep your emails in your local client instead of on gmail servers.

Remember when Gmail had growing storage? Never made it past 2%.

I know you asked for selfhost, it just didn’t seem worth it to me when I looked into it. I switched to migadu for hosting my email service. didn’t want to run my own server but now with this setup I can go anywhere and keep the same email at any time.

There are plenty of alternatives. I liked being limited by emails sent/received instead of domains and email Addresses.

Works well for me, 5 months into this setup.

I love that I'm at about the same place as you and they make it seem like a dire situation but it takes like a year to move it a few % and I just delete a bunch of pictures and more it back 10%

Fuck you google, you farm my data, I'm not paying you shit

I hosted my own mailserver for many years. The biggest problem was dealing with spam. There was so much and no open-source tool really solved it. Eventually I gave up and switched everything to a fastmail account.

Remember from the donkey's point of view the only thing that is happening is that a carrot is magically dangling in front of it.

100% agree.

Open archiver let's you download everything offline pretty easily. Set it up as an imap client. UI has pretty good search.

Read a lot of mail probs in the past, I just owe a vps for a few bugs, not because I can't host at home, it's for the static ipv4. Install stalwart on it, config SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc, to my Domain provider, well documented after setting up my domain. After a week or two, there are no mails send to spam by others.

There's fetchmail and some other options to move mail from one IMAP sever to another. This can be used to sort of hybrid self host. Gmail would receive your inbound mail, but it would be moved to your self hosted IMAP server, freeing up space on gmail. You'd point your mail client to your server. You could still use gmail for SMTP.

As far as actually self hosting IMAP, you can have multiple receiving servers set up with different priorities (via DNS MX record). Even with just 1, the normal practice is for a sending mailserver to retry for a few days, so you're unlikely to lose mail with normal self hosting down time (although I guess this can vary a lot for some).