It's annoying, but calling it "outrageous" is just silly. How much do you pay them and what did they promise you for your money?

I have got used to this great free stuff too, but I don't believe I deserve unlimited free stuff, and I won't get all huffy when they take it away.

And they don't exactly refrain from mining my personal data once I pay for their service with cash. So, it is little short of outrageous.

FYI that's not how google makes money.

Anyway, my major concern is that somehow my data stored with 'enterprise-grade' paid service still gets mined and resold to 3rd-parties. I'm being forced to pay while still it's me that's being the product. Privacy is a hefty enough price to pay for a personal email.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA

I can't pretend to know anything about IMAP or Exchange, but one would assume that push uses less than polling the email server every 5-15 minutes.

I use an Android phone and I get an email notification via text messages.

Works well in India, not so much in USA (due to the 140 char limit in Twilio, message concatenation is not allowed)

Just to put this out there, K-9 is the fork of the andriod mail client you really want to be using, it does IDLE.

The badge on the app reflects the unread count of every account that is active in the app, but even when you open it, there's utterly no indication of which inbox has unread email. I've just three accounts added to their app, and its already a hunting game finding where that mysterious (1) is coming.

Most of the interface feels weird too. You can't slide to archive an email in the new version, as it opens the siding panel. The behaviour is still hidden away though, tap and hold and slide tricks the old gesture into working again. Ticking and tapping for every interaction feels clunky.

It's not a replacement for proper psush email in Apple's Mail.app. I'd host my own push email, but I've struggled finding anything that is lightweight and supports IMAPs IDLE command (allowing for push email).

I could get over the interface oddities as that's mostly a matter of aesthetics, but it's nowhere near as fast as Mail.app to actually open your new email, and that's the killer for me.

The load time led me to delete the app. But I can't get mad about the loss of push to mail.app. TANSTAAFL.

This is making my move to Android more and more inevitable, actually. However, for a horrendous reason.

Seems to me that this is _exactly_ the reason google is doing this - to push you over to Android.

You're not paying for gmail/apps, so you're the product, and the product is now being ported to Android. It's really that simple.

That would totally suck! If it's locked down by account, I guess that's OK since existing accounts would be grandfathered.

So Google can surely change their EAS implementation to not register new clients.

Personally, I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I use my gmail as my main account, despite being far more comfortable with a service I can pay for (in the past, that was MobileMe) and know I can get customer service on the phone. Honestly, once Apple can show they've got their act together for more than a few years I'll probably switch...

I do.

>They've already changed people's email addresses as least twice, which is beyond uncool (mac.com -> me.com -> icloud.com)

And they all still work.

>Unlike your username to their services, your email address is tied into all sorts of other third-party services (not to mention address books) and is incredibly painful to update.

Since the aliases still work, as mentioned above, this is not an issue at all. Personally I prefer to use the me.com domain as it's short. It still works and the services that I use with me still work, I continue to get email from them. The same is true with .mac addresses.