but it's not expensive. there are other free email services, or you can pay for decent email hosting for a few bucks a month.

Could you post examples?

In my opinion free email services either belong to other big corporations or provide lower quality service than gmail.

Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many.

I don’t like google and I pay for a different email account. I just wanted to remind that gmail may be hard to quit and that costs are subjective.

I have all my mailboxes with gandi.net. Each domain you buy from them comes with 2 fully managed emails, and I think 3GB storage each, for just over $1/month. I basically never get spam, nor blocked emails. They have 2 webmail interfaces too, but I don't use them. As a bonus, gandi financially supports a ton of open source projects, which never hurts.

I use https://mailbox.org/en/, it's from a small German company and I can use my own domain with the smallest plan for just 1 € per month. Their spam filter also seems pretty good.

Until the day you get german spam mails because all spam filter are trained for english mails. Had to add a few keywords to tune the spam filter.

> Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many.

I pay around 3$/month for Fastmail, I don't think it's expensive, an email address is the primary communication method everyone uses nowadays and it's useful every day.

Protonmail is my choice, it supports client-side encryption. Custom domain $5 a month - unlike Google you are not paying with your private data.

https://protonmail.com

If you're not paranoid about Russia, you might consider Yandex Connect. It supports custom domains and has free tier with ads in the web interface.

Goog luck with that, Gmail is free.

We could probably start to divert all gmail and outlook originating mail to the spam folders on our mail servers in retaliation.