I have a question. You said that since you registered your own domain that no matter what service you use that with forwarding, your address will never change. Please explain how that works for you. Thanks.
I am using dotearth.com as my domain registrar. They have free email forwarding. So I advertise my email address as one of my many addresses using my domain. Then I set up forwarding of those addresses( me@mydomain.com) to the email address provided by my internet provider, currently me@sbcglobal.net. I can change that forwarding to me@yahoo.com, me@gmail.com, or whatever email service I use.
Over many years, I only had one problem. I stopped getting my email forwarded by ATT. I contacted them and they discovered that they had blocked all traffic from dotearth. By the next day and ever since then It has been smooth.
The only gotcha, is forwarding can take a minute or so.
One of these days I'll set up my own email server.