You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.

you can still do some setup and access mail by using applications like thunderbird, which have no ads.

Or use an adblocker

Ironically, the amount of effort I expend dealing with spam from the postal service is much larger than the amount of effort I expend dealing with email.

I’m pretty sure I spend less than 5 minutes a week dealing with physical spam mail. I have a recycling bin right next to where the mail arrives and most days are 15 seconds of “these go into that bin unopened” and sometimes I have to open an envelope and glance at it to see if it’s something relevant to me.

Even with the best spam filtering on email, I’m well over 5 minutes a week of distraction from it.

And now imagine how easy dealing with email spam would be if the marginal fiscal cost was not 0 like physical spam. All the technology and tools available and less than 1% of the viable spam surface area