I ran a personal email server for years and I currently have a server I can run things on, so I can set up a passable system myself for next to nothing. However, it won't be as good as gmail for reliability, spam, speed of searching, integration with my android phone, etc.

The point isn't that a good email service has extremely high utility to me, it's that I have a large number of options with a cost of nearly free. That's why I wouldn't be prepared to pay a lot for it.

Not to mention the fact that I hate recurring costs.

I am sure Google make less than $10 a year out of my using gmail as it is and they can still offer the service they do.

Well, I'd let them install devices to track my heating usage. Just like I accept that Google, who is handling my email, will check that email for relevant content to display ads.

However, if Gmail was trying to access to other things that it wasn't associated with, we'd have a problem.

Sort of like your "rhetorical question."

Fine, replace "heating" with "mail services".

Would you be OK with letting a company to scan and retain a copy of every letter you sent and receive in exchange for being able to not use stamps? Bonus question - do you think your correspondents would be OK with it if they knew you had such arrangement?

Gmail is a webmail provider. They have to retain a copy of every email sent/received, or you would only be able to read them once. They have to scan email, because otherwise you couldn't search them.

It is easy to set up Gmail such that Google doesn't have access to the text content of your mail -- simply install a desktop mail client (e.g. Thunderbird) and enable encryption. But now you've essentially disabled every feature of Gmail except for being a dumb SMTP relay.

This is all fine and dandy (and obvious), but the point is that Google is not just a webmail provider. When someone switches to Gmail, it affects me, because it lets Google track and profile me that much better. Hence the original comment - "unplugging" from Google is basically impossible, because of the proliferation of Gmail use.

This would be a problem if GMail was the only means by which to contact people. It's not. You have a choice to use email.

The truth is, when you contact someone, you don't know what is happening to that information. Gmail, if anything, makes it more clear than most other means of communication.

If you're sending someone an email, Google keeping track of "John Doe emails [email protected]" is much less of a threat than all of the dozens of intermediate parties that will record your email indefinitely.

> Would you be OK with letting a company to scan and retain a copy of every letter you sent and receive in exchange for being able to not use stamps?

Assuming there were some terms and conditions on who could access those letters, sure! In fact, if the additional benefit was they would weed out all the junk mail I get to only provide me things I'd be interested in, that's even better.

Of course, this also makes the assumption that their are still other means of communication (like phone). If the only means of communicating with me are through this service, then no.

> Do you think your correspondents would be OK with it if they knew you had such arrangement?

My correspondents? Yes. Yes I do. In fact, I believe most of them would want a service like that for themselves.

For things people wanted to send privately, they could pay to have it sent to me, like they can now.

So yes, I don't see a problem.