Get a custom domain. Strat using that. Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple.

It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail

This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder.

It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.