Actually one fun way of doing it is to run your own email setup using one of the big ESPs as a "proxy". You can do it for both inbound and outbound.
You can have a domain registered with Gmail or Rackspace Mail or whatever, and use the SMTP credentials they give you for outbound, while keeping MX records point to your own SMTP for inbound. Or you can let them process the inbound as well (fighting spam for you) and you just forward everything (or sweep via IMAP) and put it into your own Dovecot.
This way you control what's important to you (email storage/backups/etc) but outsource delivery and spam filtering.
But then they can already read everything you send and receive. At that point it's better to just use IMAP if you want to have all the e-mails local and backupped...
You can have a domain registered with Gmail or Rackspace Mail or whatever, and use the SMTP credentials they give you for outbound, while keeping MX records point to your own SMTP for inbound. Or you can let them process the inbound as well (fighting spam for you) and you just forward everything (or sweep via IMAP) and put it into your own Dovecot.
This way you control what's important to you (email storage/backups/etc) but outsource delivery and spam filtering.