With hosting of your domain you have to muck with the MX records of your domain, and there are tutorials.

With forwarding you have to make sure mail comes from the personal domain and there are tutorials.

Having recently done both, I would say they are similar levels of difficulty.

Zoho is definitely worth checking out. Their free email is good, though I think you only get 5GB of storage. The main disadvantage of forwarding your email from your domain host is that you can't send emails using the SMTP server tied to your domain address. It will appear your email is coming from one place when it is really coming from another, which can also be a spam flag these days and will often get you blocked. In other words, a service like Namecheap will forward your emails from www.domain.com for no additional charge to your Gmail account, but when you send from Gmail your email will show as coming from Gmail in the email headers.

Clarification: the From header can be set to show ....@domain.com. The actual Gmail account will be shown in the Sender header, usually invisible by default in web interfaces and email clients.

Outlook and Outlook.com will show your From address as something like "from test@gmail.com on behalf of ..." Since many (most?) businesses use Outlook as their email client it may not look very professional, but that may not concern you as long as your Gmail address isn't something embarassing.

For the initial setup, yes, however forwarding has several pitfalls when it comes to things like spam filters.

Firstly, unless your forwarding service provides good spam filters of its own, you'll likely get a lot more spam since forwarding negates the ability for RBL lists to be used. For example, there are a lot of messages that services like Gmail won't even accept if they're being delivered from known sources of spam. However if you're forwarding from another service, Gmail sees everything as coming from your forwarding server, so it will accept anything that gets passed on. This puts the onus for anti-spam filtering on the forwarding service. Any good provider like Gmail will still be able to heuristically drop those messages into the spam folder, but unless your forwarding service is handling RBLs to block inbound spam at the session level, you're going to get a lot more blatant spam showing up in your spam folder.

On the flip side, you may find more legitimate messages being classified as spam for the same reasons. Some domains have an policy (in the form of SPF/DMARC records in DNS) that authorize only specific servers to send mail from their domain. In this case, messages from those domains that pass through your forwarding server may get incorrectly flagged as spam because again, similar to the problem above, the messages are being delivered by your forwarding server, with isn't authorized to send for that domain. For example, if Hotmail.com published a list of specific servers allowed to send e-mail from "Hotmail.com" and Gmail receives a message from your forwarding server with a "Hotmail.com" from address, it's going to consider that more likely to be spam.

Using an e-mail provider that hosts your domain name and lets you point your MX record directly to them eliminates these issues, since at that point all of your messages are coming in directly, rather than being forwarded through a third-party service. It's also worth keeping in mind that some of the better email providers can handle the MX/DMARC/SPF records for you if you're willing to just let them handle your domain name hosting entirely, and even those that don't will usually provide you with "template" records that you can copy and paste into your own DNS hosting provider, saving you the trouble of having to figure those out yourself.

This is something that Fastmail does handle rather well. They've put a lot of effort into identifying the networks of third-party service providers, so often SpamAssassin can do the full range of network tests on forwarded mail against the correct IP address.

It's probabably the best service for receiving forwarded mail there is.

Where can I read about why fastmail is better than gmail for instance?

Fast mail and Gmail are two different companies with different business models. With Gmail, you are the customer and you pay by giving Gmail access to your data, and Gmail makes money off your data by selling information about you. Gmail makes a boat load of cash off you and your data.

Fastmail sells email service to you, the customer and you pay with real money. Fastmail doesn't get access to your data, and they don't sell your data. Fast mail makes just enough to cover the cost of their service.

That's the biggest difference.

Oh come on seriously? They are not in business not to make money, who is? Believe me, they make a lot more than "just enough to cover the cost of service" Rest assured, the CEO and top people live VERY well.

Um... If you do the calculations for fast mail, their revenue, their costs, and employees, etc... no one at fastmail has gotten rich yet... I hope they do, but not yet.

Sources?? :confused:

Okay huge tangent. We were talking about differences, you are focusing on one word. This is an unnecessary tangent. However there was a discussion about this very topic 5 years ago in these forums, the number of customers, cost of accounts, number of fast mail employees, etc etc etc. It's all in the forms, I remember the discussion, but I don't care enough about it to go find it for you.

The discussion thus far is focusing more on the philosophical and business model differences between Gmail and Fastmail, but there are also some more practical and technical differences that are worth keeping in mind...

Firstly, Gmail is technically free if you simply want to have a "gmail.com" account. FastMail is an entirely paid service (as others have pointed out, you "pay" for your service with Gmail in other ways, but for most people that's not a practical concern).

However, you can also pay for a Gmail account with real money through the company's G Suite service. At this point you're not really paying with your data, as you're handing Google real money. Google promises that its G Suite customer data is not used for advertising purposes.

All of that aside, however, from a technical point of view, FastMail and Gmail are pretty different animals, with slightly different feature sets that may appeal to different users.

If you live on the web, the differences may be more subtle, but FastMail uses a more traditional folder structure that's more compatible with a wide variety of e-mail clients, and as a result provides pretty tight integration with a wide range of third-party mail clients, such as Apple's Mail apps (on iOS and Mac), Thunderbird, and a whole host of others. FastMail fully supports third-party email clients to a great degree, even to the point of implementing full push e-mail support for Apple's iOS Mail apps — about the only major provider to do this other than Apple (and FastMail actually does it better than Apple does).

With Gmail, Google wants you to live primarily on the web and in their own mobile apps. This isn't to say that using a third-party mail client is impossible — Google does provide full support for this through the same IMAP protocol, but because of Gmail's "labels" structure things match up imperfectly at best, and there have been other quirks over the years with trying to use a standard mail client with Gmail —*so much so, in fact, that even Apple has had to specifically write features into Apple Mail to work around Gmail's eccentricities in recent macOS versions.

Granted, much like Apple was forced to do, Gmail is popular enough that a wide range of third-party clients are available that specifically speak Gmail's language, but it still strikes me as more effort than simply going with an open standard.

When I used Gmail, I gave up on third-party clients and just "lived on the web" and installed Google's apps on my iPhone and iPad. However, I'm not really a fan of Google's Gmail or Inbox apps on the iOS platform, and found that Apple's own Mail app, especially in recent iOS versions, provided more of the features I wanted, not the least of which was rendering HTML emails in a mobile-friendly —*and therefore readable — way (for whatever odd reason, Gmail added this feature in its iOS app a couple of years ago, but then lost that feature in the last major update).

However, if you're ultimately looking to just "live on the web" and willing to use your preferred service's native mobile apps, then the choice between Gmail and FastMail is honestly going to come down to one of whichever apps and web interface you prefer.

On my previous experience, e.g. with Bigfoot, on the internet "lifetime" usually means "about five years". :p So Fastmail have done exceptionally well compared to other "lifetime" accounts. :D

Fastmail still differ from Yahoo and Google in one crucial respect; you can be simultaneously logged-in to two accounts at the same time on the same computer. :) Although this will soon cease to be relevant to me, as I am letting my Guest account expire as I no longer use it much.