I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.

Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to deploy and maintain solution for e-mail servers, it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people - especially that typical small company or organization has a lifespan that's shorter than Google, so they don't get any important benefit from decentralization.

There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.

I started with their new theme called "Larry" and then corrected the fonts, colors, graphics, and certain element sizing decisions.