For those who like the convenience of having all of their external email commingling with their Gmail email, and taking advantage of the integration, such as calendar integration, Google Drive integration, and more, what is our best path forward?
At this point, it seems like doing a Google Workspace paid account may be the best solution for continuity of experience, but you break all the commingling and integration. Also, your you@x.com account is a separate window from your you@gmail.com account.
You could also consider a service like Fastmail. While it is reasonable quality, you don’t get the quality of the app or of the web experience, and its spam catching features don’t seem to be as good. Your access to you@x.com will be via Fastmail's own interface or some IMAP solution. The Gmail mobile app appears to support IMAP, but it's just an IMAP tool at that point, not strongly differentiated from any other IMAP tool. The Gmail web client has no support for IMAP.
I am not a Google Workspace user but I hear that its features actually lag behind the personal accounts?
From the perspective of someone who had to do a lot of administrative work by hand to increase reputation of ips because of some guy had his email hacked to send lot of spam, I find it's a good thing.
From the perspective of someone who uses the free SMTP service of Google to send emails from a not gmail domain where there is no SMTP, well it's uncomfortable. There are solutions, paid solutions, but still.
Is it really a responsibility of Google to provide a qualitative free SMTP service for other domain names ? I don't think so.
It's all on the up and up.