[bmon]

But a Google account is not just email. It's also drive, calendar, and so on. There's a lot of time spent becoming familiar with those services, and to up and switch that entire suite would take a massive amount of relearning. Under the same circumstances as the author, I think I'd be back to Google. Remember, other services have their own issues as well.

[proactivesvcs]

Having read the article, I start to wonder whether GMail is a service for Google, run by the user, where Alphabet are given invaluable personal information about a person, which they can then correlate with their other services in order to build a detailed mine of data about that person.

In the course of this transaction the user may be permitted to read the emails that belong to Alphabet.

[BrandoElFollito]

This is very much true. I built an ecosystem around Google because they work fine (usually). Rebuilding this for, say, Microsoft would be a tremendous effort.