year, three family members have lost access to their free email accounts--two Microsoft, one Gmail. One Microsoft account was locked "due to suspicious activity," and we were luckily able to restore it after going through a bunch of automated forms. The other Microsoft account was hacked, and the recovery email was changed, so that account was lost. The Gmail account was flagged for "suspicious activity," but the recovery process ends after the username and password saying, "not enough information, try again."

For both of those providers, there is no real customer service. Reddit is full of stories of people being told, "Sorry, can't help you."

I scares me to think what would happen if I somehow lost access to one of my core accounts knowing that the free providers won't help in these cases. Compare that to my credit card companies, whom I can call 24/7 and get a real person to help me fix any problems.

Are there any premium email providers that have that level of customer service?