[simias]

As long as publicly they still use standard SMTP I don't really have a problem with it. Then it's just a personal choice of the person using the service. As a third-party running my own SMTP and IMAP server I can still interact with them normally, it doesn't affect me.

Now if this is one of these "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics like gmail seems to be doing then yeah obviously it's bad in the long run but I really don't think any other email service but Google's can really pretend to do that.