I was thinking about how to improve my email situation, because at the moment I am using an address of a commercial mail provider, which obviously brings some concerns of lock-in.
While fully self-hosting the email is an option, I am a bit wary of this, because having a working email is very critical and I do trust the commercial providers to give better uptime and reliability than my old server in the closet. Does anyone have experience hosting an email service and what is it like/could you recommend it?
The other option that I am more inclined to is having the email hosted by some cloud provider, but using an address under my personal domain name. The point would be of course that I could change the email provider while keeping the address. Which providers supporting this could you recommend? What is the process like linking a domain to an email host?
I use my own domain. I do not host my own email myself though. For email providers, you have several options, Migadu being one of them. But pretty much all premium email providers nowadays allow you to use your own domain.
For aliases, I would recommend something like Addy. It is basically a forwarding service, that hides your real email address. It is really cool. Spamgourmet used to do this back in the day, but nowadays it is mostly dead.