Honest question: what do you do with email that's so personal? Disclaimer that I don't like Google mining email data, I value privacy and don't want to dismiss it.

But I'm genuinely curious what you do over email that you feel so strongly about. For me, email is basically just a notification feed for me buying shit off Amazon (which the biggest person interested in selling me shit already knows about) and me occasionally having to complain to a customer service inbox.

All personal stuff is iMessage and signal, or secure things like docusign (for employment stuff).

Honestly if I was going to make a privacy related move, it would be to move to my own email domain but still hosted on gsuite.

If your purpose of email is simply commercial emails then I may somewhat agree that paying for emails may not be a worthwhile investment.

Personally I was scared my account might be closed and I would have no recourse as I wasn't a paying customer. Years ago there were stories here of people having all their google accounts closed and being unable to even contact a human at google to check why.

someday when iMessage and Signal are long gone, you're going to want to recall a funny conversation with friends or a message from a lover that you STILL keep thinking about after all these years. when that happens, you'll probably wish those things happened on a platform that makes it easy to save for as long as you want

Takes two to tango so unfortunately most of the folks we email are using Google on the other end getting to read our messages anyhow.