Everyone uses gmail now. I remember when gmail was in beta and its limited access meant, unless they had available slots in their program, you couldn’t get a gmail account. Gmail was world class in spam filtering technology, but now, the free version is it’s weak point. 1) It enables bots to create spam accounts that abuse it, having significantly reduced it’s credibility as a mail service, and 2) Hi-jacked email accounts are rampant, 3) The free version is loaded with ads that are cleverly disguised as spam, defeating the whole purpose of preventing spam in the first place. You could pay for a gmail account to get rid of the spam. For the price of about 1 month worth of gmail, you can buy a domain. Email hosting is easy, however tricky it might be, but if you do it well and with spam filtering software, you can run your own email server. I did that for a while, however, I gave that up and paid for gmail. Later, I switched to ProtonMail because I was intrigued by its ability to incorporate encryption with PGP. However, nobody does that in practice, so I switched to Namecrane. With cheap email hosting, I also got 500GB of cloud storage via SFTP and rclone and soon Webdav (if they haven’t enabled it already, last I checked, it was in development). Why do I say this? No, it’s not an ad for Namecrane, I’m making the point that for a lifetime email hosting account with 500GB of storage, I paid $138. The only catch for you is, I signed up for this on a “doorbuster” sale, when Namecrane was brand new and trying to get cash to develop infrastructure for their brand new company. For $138, perhaps a whole year of gmail without price increases, and the cost of a domain (or in my case, now 3 of them), I have the ability to use a highly customizable email solution with email aliases, forwarding, mailboxes easily setup on a whim, no ads, and plenty of storage. They do limit the number of domains, but now it’s 100 with my account (previously 50), and honestly, if you have that many domains, you wouldn’t be using a hosting provider anyway. They use SpamExperts for spam filtering, their web email portal supports iCal for calendars, CardDav for contacts, and they even provide a decent software based email client for desktop use from their enterprise license.
So why bother with gmail? Seriously, it’s not that good. People know gmail, but why? All it is is an email service that is free. Yahoo has one too. Hotmail used to be a thing, but I clearly understand why Microsoft did away with it. There’s nothing to gain from running a free email service unless you’re doing something with ads or tracking information. Clearly, that is what Google is about; that’s what they do. It’s obnoxious, overhyped, and frankly, pathetic, because Google has pretty much taken a humble search engine and turned it into a way to make even the most computer illiterate person know how to be bombarded by ads.
I like Google maps, so I don’t block Google with NextDNS. It’s one of the reasons I use an iPhone and not an Android phone. Frankly, we’re ready to go there Google. You’re almost off my map, literally, because people don’t understand WHY the world is the way it is. It’s fixable, stop using gmail already.