Agree with all but the last suggestion.

Email is great, and there is no reason to give it up

If you want full control, just publish an MX record in DNS, and run you own email server. The TCP session will be established directly between you and the sender. Encryption options are available and evolving, thanks to IETF and other bodies. All you have to pay is just a couple of hours of your time for setting it all up, and $15/yr for the DNS.

No, the TCP session will be established between your mail server and the sender's. And since the other party's mail server often happens to belong to Google, Yahoo or <insert big mail provider>, this doesn't increase security at all. (As long as you don't use end-to-end encryption but even then they still see your social network.)

_not_ running your own mail server because other people won't is a fallacy.

If everyone thinks like you do, sure, not much changes- but if 10% of people think like me! Then we chat with each other without snoops or middlemen.

I totally agree. That's why I'm running my own mail server, as well. That doesn't change the fact, though, that email is fundamentally broken these days.

Are there good spam filters these days?

I started running my own mail server recently and spam hasn't been much of a problem with postscreen + spamassassin (with pyzor and razor).

Also, if you are worried about deliverability of your own e-mail: worry less. I am running my mail server on a VPS and the only place I've had any trouble delivering mail to so far is hotmail. They were blocking my IP, so I requested that they investigate the block and it was removed within hours.

It's really been a very pleasant experience.

Hotmail is doing the same with my server's IP because apparently someone else with a similar IP is a spammer. Could you tell me who you contacted?

Fill out and submit this form: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/getsupport?oaspworkflow=...

First I got this strange and confusing response:

    Dear x
    Please note that your ticket number is in the subject line of this mail.
    x.x.x.x
    Note: Errors are unlikely, however, if an error is indicated, please resubmit the specific IP or IP range.
    Thank you,
    Outlook.com Deliverability Support
    Please do not reply to this message as it is from an unattended mailbox.
    Any replies to this email will not be responded to or forwarded.
    This service is used for outgoing emails only and cannot respond to inquiries.

About an hour later I got another e-mail from them informing me that my IP address had been "conditionally mitigated", and I was then able to send e-mails to Hotmail.

Yes there are, and many of them will block all of your email if you run your own server...

Or did you mean "good for independent email operators"?

SpamAssassin works well enough for me.

Or move into heavy, future-proofed encryption as the norm.

Initiated on endpoint by open protocol and implementation, too.