In an attempt to avoid google, I kept a non-gmail address that I don’t administer, and instead forwarded it elsewhere.

The administrators of the account decided to outsource the smtp relay to google. It is ridiculously unreliable, and regularly sends “no such address” responses to my synology NAS (which emails me periodically).

Similarly, when I used gmail’s IMAP gateway for work, it was regularly down.

I’m pretty sure Google will succeed at killing email. I hope gmail also goes down in flames if they succeed.