My last choice would be to use the current ISP your signed up with. It has change to often for me in the past and they currently only give me 10MB of space.
I have a more convoluted approach that works for me. I have a vanity eMail that cost me around $25/year that is my
FirstName@LastName.com Easy to tell people and I can forward it anywhere I want. I use a company called NetIdentity.com but there are lots of these kind of companies, this one happen to have my surname already registered. They were a lot cheaper when I signed up 8+ years ago but I figure it is still a good deal because they do a first cut at spam filtering and my eMail address never changes. I could download directly from them or read with an web interface, I don't. I use to forward to my ISP but changed about 6 months ago. I now forward to my gMail account, which by the way can have an extra dot in it so I registered with
FirstName.LastName@gMail.com also easy to remember. I now can download from gMail when I have my computer and use the web interface when I'm on vacation or need to pop in and check from any web browser. You can have gMail setup to have multiple address to chose from for where it was sent from so the person I sent to see my vanity eMail address. Google does a second level of spam filtering and then my mail program does a 3rd level. With this approach I average less than one spam message a day on average and I get a lot of eMail. My address is on numerous web sites that I maintain and I do lots of buying on the web so I have lots of exposure for spammers to harvest my address.
I would say Google Mail is as reliable as any other service I have used over the years maybe better. Most mail delays I have seen were web related not gMails problem.
If you don't want to go to the expense of a vanity eMail I would go with Google and use my
FirstName.LastName@gMail.com approach. If you want to use your local ISP you can have gMail forward to your local and still use your gMail address as your primary address to hand out, you loose the ability to get to your mail from the web, but what ever work.
Boy that got long winded.
Jeb