I use fastmail because the payment is direct: I give them a few bucks each month.
With free email (gmail) the payment is not direct. They are doing something to get money, but what is unknown.
I guess you mean something uknown and nefarious.
And you are more comfortable with Qihoo 360, the Chinese company that owns Opera/fastmail?
Downsides:
* spam detector is a bit aggressive, sometimes legitimate emails make it in there.
* features are limited unless you pay.
Full disclosure: I pay for their Plus product. My rationale is that I pay twice as much per month for Netflix yet email is hugely more valuable to me than Netflix is.
More full disclosure: I used to work for Google. That's part of what made me move from Gmail.
A good email service is one worth paying for.
May be if I'm paying some money to some local company in my city, I can have some confidence, because I can come to their office and yell at them until they return my data to me. But they can just be incompetent and lose it, so even in this case I better do backups.
[EDIT: Sorry, missed the 'free' in there. Guess you get what you pay for]
If they could solve for my situation and not charge me that kind of money, I would switch from Gmail immediately.
This is why Google keeps winning and everyone else is losing, particularly the people who get the "free" services but don't have any say about those services.
The real numbers might be different, but I heard that Google gets about $100/yr in ad revenue per user. That is, they are getting $800 a year for all of those people. Everything you buy is $800 more expensive and there is no way you can say no to that!
If I spend $300 dollars on a phone every 2-3 years and $40 for service a month, am I then permitted to raise concerns about spending hundreds of dollars a year for email accounts?
By the way, Fastmail prices are rising. One used to be able to get a free account, and the standard plan used to be $40 a year, so might be good to get them sooner rather than later to get grandfathered-in in case of upcoming price risings.
$210 annually seems like a deal if it keeps your family’s most sensitive private messages away from ad targeting.
A lot depends upon how frugal you already are, but I found it trivial to find some extra savings to pay for it. There's a few things I like to treat myself to, and doing that one less time per month pays for it. Eating out one less time per month pays for it too. Ordering slightly cheaper meals for myself when we eat out would also pay for it.
Hell, when I turned off my home server, which I rarely used, I saved $9/month in electricity. If you live in a high power cost state, do a personal power audit. Our family was pretty lazy with turning things off until I figured out how much it costs to run any given thing.
With a family of 6, if you haven't crunched your finances, there are lots of very minor behavior changes that can save you enough money to pay for something like fastmail.
They removed the free GSuite tier a long time ago, and they've obscured some the options you could use to configure a similar setup in gmail. I'm not sure if it's still possible.
There is the huge possibility that this will cause issues with some mail servers because I'm assuming it's doing a send on behalf of (I could be totally wrong). But so far (1yr+) I don't recall any issues.
I switched to Proton for a bit but I just didn't enjoy using it at all. The final nail in that coffin; I was in the middle of selling a house and receiving documents and tons of back and forth and it was an absolutely terrible experience. Every realtor/contractor/etcs signature pictures, etc showed up as attachments and the search was awful so having to dig up contracts and everything else that goes along with a house sale was just an absolutely miserable experience. Every single email looked like it had tons of attachments. I had to go through every single email in a thread to find the actual documents.
So I went back to gmail.