I'm a semi-frequent viewer of the Tek, and I constantly hear Logan and Wendell talk trash about Gmail. I'm curious on who the Tek Syndicate community's email provider of choice is these days.
From what I hear, ProtonMail.
As far as free options, I'm not sure. I just set up my own through my domain.
Do you know how long it takes for them to respond to invitations?
I'm using Fastmail with my own domain and I love it.
It isn't free though but I don't mind paying for a quality service and all the customization I actually need AND use.
I dunno about mail server hosting but if you can set it up yourself and you need web access, RainLoop is a good web mail client. But then there's also MailPile which is safer, so I'm not sure what's the "best" at the moment.
I use the email my ISP provides then I use Mozilla Thunderbird to get all my mail.