I'd be interested to hear how eg fastmail is or isn't an alternative for someone who feel locked-in to Gmail.
In my mind it's mostly a creepy and half-assed webmail provider with crappy imap support. But I've never really used Gmail all that much (because: creepy evil ad company and email is an obvious bad combination).
I've been working on webmail that only receives messages, doesn't send any. And I've been using it to signup on websites with, it works really well for the purpose because anything that ever arrives was sent by a computer.
I bring it up because it feels like that's a primary reason why people might be trapped on gmail is just that all the websites they are signed up on are linked to it.
In my mind it's mostly a creepy and half-assed webmail provider with crappy imap support. But I've never really used Gmail all that much (because: creepy evil ad company and email is an obvious bad combination).