[y0ghur7_xxx]

> How would I get to know the new email address of my friend who we only talked using Gmail for example?

Call him up on the phone or message him on whatsapp or... whatever...

email IS decentralised. Even if we had ONLY gmail, a startup could implement a better email frontend and be successful.

[freehunter]

How do you call someone on the phone if you only ever talked via Gmail and suddenly don't have any of those messages anymore?

[StreamBright]

Exactly. I have many of these.

[rglullis]

I think you and the one that I responded to are confusing the abstract nature of a system with its practicality. As much as Google would like to, they can't simply close their email servers for outside addresses and still call it an email provider. It would be a whole different beast.

The fact that you don't get to talk with other people only because an big email provider would disappear does not change the fact that email messaging systems are designed to be inter-operable. That is the key point. To try to argue otherwise is insane.