(Since Dave gets to have his own blog offering wisdom on the best products, I'll just have to post my usual drivel here.)
I have been a customer of the email hosting provider FastMail for years. At first I used their $15 / lifetime account as a dedicated backup account. I have generally liked managing my own email server, and applied the skills gained in doing that to my day job. Spam was even fun -- watching the endless cat and mouse game of measures and counter-measures has been both amusing and instructive.
For a variety of reasons I recently decided to stop playing the game and move our email service from my own zachary.com host to FastMail. Like gmail and the others, they offer a nice web interface, huge amounts of storage, great spam filtering and so on. I signed up for a custom-designed, multi-user, hosted domain family account.
Unlike gmail they are not free. So why pay? First, it's not that much. Second, email is their core business -- all of their focus is on providing a feature rich, reliable, speedy email service. If Google needs a bit more engineering attention on their Adsense product, I'm sure that they wouldn't hesitate to pull resources from their other "products."
Finally, Google knows enough about me -- they don't need to have my entire email archive on their servers too. I think spreading my digital footprint around rather than keeping it all in one place seems like a good thing.
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